Working with Composer vendor files in remote server

Question

I'm getting my feet wet with dependencies. I recently wrote a small application in PHP and used Composer to get some dependencies (mainly Slim, twig, hassankhan/config and illuminate/database). So I have the project in my local computer and basically have:

public folder
app folder
vendor folder
composer.phar
composer.json
composer.lock

It's now time to upload to my web server (I work with a GoDaddy hosting account with Linux CPanel). The question is, what should I do? Do I upload the whole thing, with the vendor folder and composer files? Or am I supposed to use Composer in a different way when uploading to my hosting? Never done this before so any guidance will be deeply appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You are not required to use Composer in any particular way. I recommend using it in the way that works best for you. That will depend on the type of development and release process you use. It sounds like you are using a fairly short and simple process where you develop for a while, decide the code is ready, and upload it to your production server. With this process, you could simply upload everything, vendor directory and all - just as you state. This could lead to unused files/directories not being removed but that is a general problem with this type process anyway (you can work around it by first deleting everything, breaking your site temporarily).

Composer helps you (among other things) "lock" all of the required libraries at some specific version. This is very useful when used with version control, tagged releases, and multiple environments (such as your development environment, a QA/Testing environment, and a Production environment). This helps ensure that each environment uses the exact same versions of the required vendor libraries.

If you were to try to use composer directly on your hosted server (i.e composer update), you would have to make sure that the php cli is available and that all other prerequisites for composer (including composer itself) were available. This is usually hard to count on for generic hosting providers so, you really are better off not trying to execute composer there.

As your project matures and uptime is important, you will want your development and deployment processes to mature as well. That's when you will realize many of the benefits of Composer.