If you've been developing any kind of PHP applications lately, chances are you've at least heard of Composer. This package manager has dramatically changed the way we develop in PHP but there are still some out there wondering what all the fuss is about. In this tutorial from SitePoint author Claudio Ribeiro (re-)introduces this powerful tool and provides some basics of its use.

In this article, we will tackle the basics of Composer, and what makes it such a powerful and useful tool.

Before we go into detail, there are two things that we need to have in mind: what Composer is [and] what Composer is not. [...] Essentially, Composer allows you to declare and manage every dependency of your PHP projects.

He then walks you through the installation of the tool, running it either globally or locally (per-project). He lists out some of the basic commands, what they're for and helps you on your way to installing your first package: PHPUnit. He also covers the special "vendor" folder Composer creates, how autoloading works, various configuration values and installing packages globally rather than just locally. He then talks about the other side of the PHP package ecosystem: Packagist including how to submit packages and set up your own package's composer.json so it can be pulled in correctly.