The Master Zend Framework site has posted a new tutorial showing you how to automate your projects with Composer, making use of the "scripts" section to add commands that can be automatically executed via a "composer" command line call.

Here, in the second part of the series, we’ll look at the scripts section of composer.json. If you’ve never heard of this section, it provides a way to automate tasks in your project.

Perhaps you think that this is unnecessary, as there is already such a wealth of tools available; including Make, Ant, Phing, and so on. But I see a place for having automation in Composer — though at first I didn’t.

Why? Because you can bring everything that much closer together. Because you can keep everything in a very tidy, organized, and well-structured way.

He starts with a brief overview of how the "scripts" section of the composer.json configuration works. He also shows examples of setting up scripts for code sniffing, running tests and generating test coverage reports. He also shows how to run these commands via the Composer command line and an the use of event handlers (like "post-install-cmd") to execute things at a certain point in the install/update process. He finishes off the post with an example from Zend Expressive calling an "Automation" to clear out the contents of the caches.