Composer Workbench

A workbench for Composer that allows you to symlink your "offline" packages without writing them to the composer.lock file.

!!Please note!! This package has only been tested on macOS. It should work fine for Linux, but probably not for Windows.

Installation

Workbench is a plugin for Composer and installs like so:

composer global require tormjens/workbench

Usage

Once installed you'll notice a workbench.json file in your root composer directory (create it if you can't find it). On a mac that's usually /Users/username/.composer.

The file should look like this:

{
    "sources": [],
    "targets": []
}

Inside the sources key, you'll place the absolute paths to where your local packages are located. It will search using a glob so if you have many packages you may specify the "top level".

For example if you have packages at

• /Users/username/packages/myfirstpackage
• /Users/username/packages/mysecondpackage
• /Users/username/packages/mythirdpackage

You would then only add the path /Users/username/packages and all of your packages would be found.

Inside the targets key, you'll place the absolute paths to where this plugin should be enabled. This will also search using a glob. A few examples:

• /Users/username/* Plugin is enabled for all paths inside your home folder
• * Plugin is enabled everywhere
• /Users/username/webapps/awesomeapp Plugin is constrained to just the awesomeapp folder

So your workbench.json could look like:

{
    "sources": [
        "/Users/username/packages"
    ],
    "targets": [
        "/Users/username/webapps"
    ]
}

Run Composer without Workbench

Some times, for various reasons, you may want to run composer install and other commands without triggering workbench. In that case you may prefix the command with WORKBENCH=0. This will deactivate Workbench for that run.

WORKBENCH=0 composer install

Caveats

While Workbench solves the issue of your custom local packages not being written to your project's .lock file, it will not be able to detect local changes to your composer.json during install. Hence you'll need to push and update for every of those changes.