On the Clear Code blog today there's an article posted showing you how to manage your application with Composer, the PHP dependency manager that's taken the PHP community by storm.

Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP based projects. It allows you to declare, install, and then manage all of your dependencies in your project. Right, so you can manage the libraries that your project requires in order to work. But is that all you can really do with Composer? Definitely not! In fact, I believe this is a very small part of Composer and its possibilities. In this article, I’ll try to show you how Composer can be used for performing more complex tasks in PHP based projects.

He shows how to set up a system where even the base parts of the applications become dependencies and can be built up as a part of the Composer install. He includes an example of pulling from a private version control source and the matching "composer.json" file the repository will need. He also includes the composer commands to get the install up and running as well as a warning about handling credentials as a part of the execution.