How to properly load local dependencies with composer

Sometime you may find yourself working on an application and needed to load some local package, component or fork in order for you to be able to temporarily try some things and keep everything clean and organized while you’re developing. You’re first thought could be to copy the package content into your vendor directory or even symlink it. But that’s the ugly way to do this, fortunately there’s a better way.

Let’s take a simple example and consider an application with the following structure:

apps/
    app/
        composer.json
    
component/
    package1/
        composer.json
    package2/
        composer.json

Composer has the concept of repositories which are nothing more than a package source. As the official composer documentation says, composer will look inside all the repositories for the packages your application needs. By default composer has one primary repository configured and you’re already using it: Packagist. But of course you can configure other repositories in your application composer.json file.

! Note: Repositories are available only for the root package, because composer does not load repositories recursively.

Your composer.json file should look like this:

  ...
  "repositories": [
    {
      "type": "path",
      "url": "../component/package1"
    }
  ],
  "require": {
    "vendor/package1": "*"
  }
  ...

Composer will try first to symlink the package if possible, else the package will be copied. You can also force composer to use symlink with "symlink": true.

  ...
  "repositories": [
    {
      "type": "path",
      "url": "../component/package1",
      "options": {
        "symlink": true
      }
    }
  ],
  "require": {
    "vendor/package1": "*"
  }
  ...

! Note: If you want to disable the default repository Packagist, you can do it by adding the following in your composer.json file.

  "repositories": [
      {
          "packagist.org": false
      }
  ]

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