The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial for the Composer users out there talking about Composer plugin development and how they can add functionality to this already powerful tool.

Composer is the sharpest tool in the toolbox of the modern PHP developer. The days of manual dependency management are in the distant past, and in their place we have wonderful things like Semver. Things that help us sleep at night, because we can update our dependencies without smashing rocks together.

[...] Even though we use Composer so frequently, there’s not a lot of shared knowledge about how to extend it. [...] Yet, recent changes have made it much easier to develop Composer plugins. [...] So, today I thought we would explore the possibilities of Composer plugin development, and create a fresh bit of documentation as we go.

He walks you through the creation of a simple plugin: one that tracks users and the dependencies they require. He shows you how to create the initial plugin boilerplate and the creation of the addDependencies and activate methods. These grab the dependencies being added and send the information off to a remote site.