The BugSnag blog has posted a tutorial from a guest author, Graham Campbell, introducing you to Packagist and the PHP ecosystem continuing on from the previous post introducing the Composer tool.

In our last blog post we saw the basics of Composer, but skipped over where it actually finds its packages, and how to publish packages of your own. In this blog post, we will be looking at exactly this, plus some security considerations when using composer in your application.

The post starts off by introducing Packagist and how you can distribute your package there. There's a section that covers Open Source licenses, a few of the different types and how to list licenses of your currently installed packages. Following this the post talks about using branches and aliases to pull in the code you need (not just the latest release). The tutorial wraps up with a look at some of the security concerns around using packages and how to keep on top of new versions with new bugfixes.