Use Composer to install packages not on Packagist

Packagist and Composer are a great combination for installing the packages that we need for our projects (in my case for Laravel 4 project). For example you want to use Sentry 2 so you simply add "cartalyst/sentry": "2.0.*" as required package in your composer.json file. But what if we need a package that is not on Packagist? There are several ways but I will show you two solutions (and maybe add others later).

Installing package that has no composer.json file

In my case I wanted to add Jquery.Gantt package to my Laravel 4 project. This package is not listed on Packagist and doesn’t have its own composer.json file so you can’t just add "Jquery.Gantt": "1.0.*" under "require": in your composer.json file.

What we need to do is add some code to our composer.json file to tell Composer something about the new package,where to find it etc.

Just so you can imagine how this looks when it is all done, here is my entire composer.json file for one of my projects.Keep in mind that you only have to add what is highlighted in grey (lines 2-19 and line 26) to your composer.json file and not everything. The rest of the code is for my project and is included only so you can see where to put your code. Don’t forget to backup the original composer.json before doing this 🙂

  {
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "package",
            "package": {
                "name": "taitems/jQuery.Gantt",
                "version": "1.0",
                "dist": {
                    "url": "https://github.com/taitems/jQuery.Gantt/archive/master.zip",
                    "type": "zip"
                },
                "source": {
                    "url": "https://github.com/taitems/jQuery.Gantt.git",
                    "type": "git",
                    "reference": "dev-master"
                }
            }
        }
    ],
	"require": {
		"laravel/framework": "4.0.*",
		"cartalyst/sentry": "2.0.*",  
		"jasonlewis/expressive-date": "1.*",
		"opauth/opauth": "*",
		"opauth/facebook": "*",  
		"taitems/jQuery.Gantt": "1.0",  
		"way/generators": "dev-master"
	},
	"autoload": {
		"classmap": [
			"app/commands",
			"app/controllers",
			"app/models",
			"app/database/migrations",
			"app/database/seeds",
			"app/tests/TestCase.php"
		]
	},
	"scripts": {
		"post-update-cmd": "php artisan optimize"
	},
	"minimum-stability": "dev"
}

Lines 2-19: You have to change few things of course, depending on what package you are installing. Copy the Name from GitHub page (I took mine from https://github.com/taitems/jQuery.Gantt)). You can find both ZIP and .git URLs on GitHub page of that package. Version should be the package version number you want to use – if you are not sure then try * sign.

Line 26: You add this just like you would normaly add every dependency/package that is listed on Packagist.

That’s it. Just run php composer.phar update and your new package will be installed into /vendor/ folder, just like every other package/dependency.

Installing package that is not on Packagist but has composer.json file

I have not tried this yet but in case the package has composer.json file you can just use this code:

"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "vcs",
        "url": "https://github.com/taitems/jQuery.Gantt"
    }
]

It’s the same as in first example – you start from line 2, after the opening {. Do we are using VCS repository instead of the package repository. Composer will use the GitHub API to fetch the branch names and check if the version dev-soft-deleteable-products-disabled exists. If it does, it will clone the repository and check out said branch.

Again, run php composer.phar update and your new package should be installed into /vendor/ folder, just like every other package/dependency.

Note: VCS example will not work on the jQuery.Gantt package because this package has no composer.json file so you have to use the first method. VCS example is here only to demonstrate what to do when the package has composer.json file included.

Script php artisan clear-compiled handling the pre-update-cmd event returned with an error

I had a problem with Basset package (website didn’t load, it kept timing out) so I tried to remove it from the composer.json file to see if it helps. After running php composer.phar update I got this error:

Script php artisan clear-compiled handling the pre-update-cmd event returned with an error

You can even get this error:

Script php artisan optimize handling the post-update-cmd event returned with an error

To fix this error open your composer.json file and delete the scripts key (or just the part that fails – in bold). In my case it was this:

	"scripts": {
		"pre-update-cmd": [
			"php artisan clear-compiled"
		],
		"post-install-cmd": [
			"php artisan optimize"
		],
		"post-update-cmd": [
			"php artisan optimize"
		]
	},

I ran php composer.phar update again and it worked.

Some people report that after this they have problems with running php artisan optimize and few others . I didn’t have this problem but if you have it then delete the app/bootstrap/compiled.php file and then try running php composer.phar update

Laravel erorr: Call to undefined method Illuminate\Foundation\Application::getConfigLoader()

After I resolved my speed problems with Composer (see the post here ) I got this error once the Composer ended updating dependencies:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method Illuminate\Foundation\Application::getConfigLoader() in E:\path-to-my-project\vendor\laravel\framework\src\Illuminate\Foundation\start.php on line 106

As I already mentioned in my previous post I don’t know if this was due to me canceling composer updates several times or something else but the same error appeared when I opened my project URL in web browser.

The solution is simple: Delete bootstrap/compiled.php file.

After that run php artisan optimize command, which will generate new compiled.php file. I am not sure if this last step is necessary because everything seems to work even without the compiled.php file but I would advice to run this command just in case and regenerate compiled.php file.

Installing / updating Composer dependencies is very slow or time outs

I wanted to speed up my coding by adding Laravel 4 Generators and Laravel Artisan plugin for Sublime text 2 (you can learn more about this here). I added "way/generators": "dev-master" to my composer.json file as instructed and ran "php composer.phar update" and waited….and waited…and waited. How can downloading simple text files be so slow when I have very fast connection?

For some reason I always had problems with composers speed – installing or updating dependencies was very slow. By searching net I saw that a lot of people have similar problems and various solutions are offered – for some they work and for some they don’t. I would advise you to try them out and see if any of them help you.

One of the most common advices is to use the --prefer-dist switch:

php composer.phar update --prefer-dist

I ran it however it didn’t help me. Composer got stuck on updating symfony/filesystem dev-master. After 5 minutes I got this error:

[Symfony\Component\Process\Exception\RuntimeException]
The process timed-out.

After trying it few times with the same result I realized that git.exe was having some problems with my network (not sure what). So the problem seems to be with Git protocol, at least in my case. Composers default github-protocols config settings is ["git", "https", "http"]. So what I did was changed github-protocols to https with this command:

php composer.phar config -g github-protocols https

I ran the update again and it started working, much faster and no timeouts.

Note: I don’t know if this was due to me canceling composer updates several times but after composer finished updating I got this error for the first time :

Fatal error: Call to undefined method Illuminate\Foundation\Application::getConfigLoader()

The solution for this can be found here.