On the Laravel News site there's a new post that continues their series about building applications with Composer. In this latest post they talk about the "other half" of the Composer ecosystem - Packagist.

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.

Packagist is the primary package repository for Composer. This is where you can publish your packages, and also where you can view other people’s packages. Composer will use Packagist to look for packages by default, however, more advanced users can customize this if they wish.

With the basic description out of the way, they then get into how to add your package to Packagist for others to use. The post also talks about package licensing, development versions, branch aliases, security considerations and how to keep on top of new versions of the packages you have installed.