PHP Packages Finding Composer Packages

PHP Packages

Finding Composer Packages

Problem

You want to find packages you can install using Composer.

Solution

Check Packagist or ask Composer to list or search packages.

Discussion

Packagist is the primary collection of Composer packages. Anyone can add their package to its directory, so others can find it by browsing or searching.

Figure  Guzzle Package Information page on the Packagist website

Packagist doesn’t host any source code or documentation. For that, you need to visit the project’s repository and home page.

Composer can list all the packages known by Packagist with the show command:

     % php composer.phar show

     No composer.json found in the current directory, showing available packages ↵

     from packagist

     platform:

          composer-plugin-api  1.0.0            The Composer Plugin API

          ext-bcmath                   0                   The bcmath PHP extension

     ...

          lib-xsl                            1.1.26           The xsl PHP library

          php                                5.3.26          The PHP interpreter

          php-64bit                     5.3.26          The PHP interpreter (64bit)

     available:

          0k/php-oe-json

          0s1r1s/dev-shortcuts-bundle

          0x20h/monoconf

     ...

          zz/zz

          zzal/cakephp-hash

However, this list is tens of thousands of lines long. So, it’s better to search instead using the search command:

     % php composer.phar search http

     No composer.json found in the current directory, showing packages from packagist

     guzzle/http HTTP libraries used by Guzzle

     illuminate/http

     symfony/http-foundation Symfony HttpFoundation Component

     symfony/http-kernel Symfony HttpKernel Component

     net/http A basic HTTP client

     minfraud/http MaxMind minFraud HTTP API

     react/http Library for building an evented http server.

     techdivision/http HTTP protocol implementation for usage in server context

     vinelab/http An http library developed for the laravel framework. aliases

            itself as HttpClient

     joomla/http Joomla HTTP Package

     minond/http Http helpers

     icanboogie/http Provides an API to handle HTTP requests.

     aura/http The Aura HTTP package provides objects to build and send HTTP ↵

     requests and responses.

     orno/http A wrapper for Symfony\HttpFoundation with some encapsulation and ↵

     convenience methods.

     zendframework/zend-http provides an easy interface for performing Hyper-Text ↵

     Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests