Composer is now at version 1

Earlier this month Composer became version 1.0.0 after five years of development securely replacing [PEAR] as the de facto dependency manager for PHP.

It is a great tool for managing project library dependencies like what npm does for Node.js. This is different from package managers like Yum and Apt which install libraries globally.

If you are interested in why PEAR needed to be replaced see https://philsturgeon.uk/php/2012/03/06/packages-the-way-forward-for-php/.

Now assembling and maintaining libraries from Laravel, Symfony, and Zend is a breeze instead of a nightmare.

For basic usage see https://getcomposer.org/doc/01-basic-usage.md. The main file is composer.json which has its schema defined at https://getcomposer.org/doc/04-schema.md.

Its license along with the content on it site are licensed under the liberal MIT license.

To install Composer follow the commands from https://getcomposer.org/download/ which include verifying the installer, though for those also using OS X, then I suggest you use Homebrew to install Composer:

brew update
brew install homebrew/php/composer

For more details, see https://getcomposer.org/.