Peter Petermann has shared a few of his thoughts about right and wrong things to do when using Composer in your PHP-based applications. He offers suggestions based on some of the more wide-spread (but wrong, in his opinion) practices he's seen in several projects.

Last year I wrote a piece called “a few thoughts about composer and how people use it“. In that post I had a list of things which are problematic about how composer is used. That post got widely recognized, linked an visited, but in general those issues still exist.

However lately I’ve had even more people asking questions (either on related forums, irc or even irl) about problems that stem from issue number 2: people are using composer as an installer (and sometimes Number 3 because of Number 2). In that Post I already gave a quick opinion on how workflows with composer should look like, In this post I’ll try to give a few more pointers on how to use composer without creating a mess.

He then breaks up the remainder of the post into various practices he's seen and calling out developers for doing including:

• starting a project vs installing
• globally installed composer packages
• tagging and building

With each of his points he makes suggestions about what's wrong about the practice as well as some suggestions about how things could be done better.