You might have heard about Composer but aren't quite sure what all the fuss is about it. In this new tutorial on the ServerGrove blog, they introduce you to it, help you get it installed and show how it can help you make dependency management simpler.

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows us to declare the libraries (packages from now on) on which our project depends on and downloads them for us. With many high quality packages available to us, the are redefining they way we are building PHP software. You can browse through the wide variety of packages at the composer main repository packagist.org. Composer is a simple tool to use and this tutorial will go over the installation and usage basics.

They walk you through the installation (or either *nix or Windows) and help you get started with your first "composer.json" configuration file. They talk about "composer.lock" and the role it plays and how Composer uses is (and the json version) to pull in dependencies for your libraries of choice. The article also briefly covers the "composer" command and the options it provides.