What is Composer?

Composer is a tool for dependency management for PHP that help us to manage the packages. Composer is a package manager for PHP — it helps you install, update, and use code written by others in your own PHP project.

🛠️ What Does Composer Do?

1. ✅ Installs packages (libraries/tools your project needs)
2. 📦 Tracks dependencies (it knows which version of which library your app uses)
3. 🔄 Updates libraries when new versions are available
4. 📁 Creates autoloaders (makes it easy to include and use classes automatically)

📘 Simple Example

Say you’re building a PHP app and want to send emails.
Instead of writing everything from scratch, you can use a package like PHPMailer.
With Composer, you just run:

composer require phpmailer/phpmailer

✅ Step 1: Check if Composer is Installed

🔍 Open your terminal or command prompt and run:

composer -V

or

composer --version

✅ If installed, you’ll see something like:

Composer version 2.7.2 2024-05-15 16:45:23

❌ If not installed, you’ll get something like:

'composer' is not recognized as an internal or external command...

💾 Step 2: How to Install Composer (if not installed)

1. Go to https://getcomposer.org/
2. Download the Composer-Setup.exe
3. Run it and follow the instructions (make sure PHP is installed)

Common Composer Commands

Here’s a list of useful Composer CLI commands with short descriptions: