If you've been developing any PHP at all recently, you've probably heard about the Composer package management tool that's caught on like wildfire in the community. If you're not currently using it, you might wonder what it's all about. Well, in this recent post on the Fortrabbit blog, Ulrich Kautz explains the tool and how to get started using it.

Composer describes itself as "a tool for dependency management in PHP". It uses a large repository of packages which is continuously extended and maintained by the community. It is now out there for about a year or so. This article goes out to everybody who is not already using it: we want you to give it a try it and here is why.

He talks about what Composer is (really a "dependency manager" more than a "package manager") and why its a good thing for projects to use. He gives the quick install instructions and an example of setting up a "composer.json" file to pull in the Twig templating and Doctrine ORM libraries. There's also a quick mention of including the Composer autoloader so it can find the resources correctly.