Sometimes we just want to run composer command directly in our PHP code. But there seems to be no other easy solution other than exec() or shell_exec() … or is there?
It turns out there is a built-in Composer helper class in Laravel’s ecosystem! Yes, that’s right, it lives under the Illuminate\Support namespace. However, it doesn’t have a method to run arbitrary composer commands out of the box.
Let’s tweak it and add some new flavour! 😎
Let’s begin
We will create a new Composer class that inherits \Illuminate\Support\Composer.
Usage
Programatically install a package:
app()->make(\App\Composer::class)->run(['require', 'some-package']);Updating packages:
app()->make(\App\Composer::class)->run(['update']);Troubleshooting
If you see this:
The HOME or COMPOSER_HOME environment variable must be set for
composer to run correctlyYou will need to add COMPOSER_HOME (composer config directory) to the environmental variable.
See here for the documentation.
To solve this, you can either:
- Add COMPOSER_HOME to .env with the value of
$HOME/.config/composer - Supply a one-off environment variable to the run command.
Eg.
$this->getProcess($command)->run(function ($type, $data){
echo $data;
}, [
'COMPOSER_HOME' => '$HOME/.config/composer']);
