Using Composer to install packages for your Drupal project

24 June 2016 on Drupal

I have recently been working on a lot of Drupal 8 sites and a few modules have had Composer dependencies. When I first looked into how the dependencies worked I always seemed to hit a problem where I didn’t know how dependencies should be installed for Drupal. This is a brain dump of how I get Composer dependencies for Drupal modules working successfully.

First install Composer (OS X)

Run the following command from terminal to create a Phar (PHP Archive) file called composer.phar

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Make Composer globally accessible

To make Composer globally accessible by simply typing composer. The file needs to be moved to /usr/local/bin/ and then an alias needs to be setup:

sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/
pico ~/.bash_profile

Inside ~/.bash_profile add the following line.

alias composer="php /usr/local/bin/composer.phar"

Relaunch terminal or run source ~/.bash_profile and you should be able to access Composer by typing composer.

Composer within Drupal 8

Drupal needs to know the Composer endpoint, there are two versions, one for Drupal 7 & one for 8. From the Drupal root of your project the following command needs be executed. (Please note this is using the Drupal 8 endpoint)

composer config repositories.drupal composer https://packages.drupal.org/8

Once Composer knows about the endpoints the Composer packages can be install.

composer install

More information about Composer and the different versions can be found on drupal.org.