If you're a PHP developer and have been looking for a good way to manage 3rd party dependencies in your applications, look no further than Composer. If you're already using it, you know how useful it can be, but you might not know about some of the extra features that come with it. In this new tutorial on PHPMaster.com, they describe the automation that is also possible as a part of Composer's management process.

Following Alexander Cogneau’s introduction to dependency management with Composer, you now know that Composer is a resolver for managing external project dependencies and versioning constraints. But is that all it does? In this article I’ll show you how Composer can also be used as a basic build automation tool.

Thanks to some handy configuration settings available in the "composer.json" file, you can execute scripts for events like "pre-install", "post-update" and "pre-uninstall". They include an example "Installer" class with methods for a few of the actions, showing some of the special methods you can use to get metadata about the current operation and environment.