In a new post to his site Martin Hujer shows you that, with the help of the "script" ability in Composer, you may not need a build tool like Phing. The scripts functionality allows you to execute custom scripts as a part of the Composer workflow, enhancing the management functionality it already provides.

Phing is a great tool (I'm using it as well), but in this article, I want to show you that some projects may not need it. Composer contains a powerful feature called "Scripts", which can be used to create a simple build script.

In his example, he shows how to integrate a run of the PHP_CodeSniffer quality assurance tool as a part of your Composer configuration. This makes it possible to run a command like composer run-script phpcs and automatically run the checks. He then builds on this simple example and creates a more complex build script that still runs PHP_CodeSniffer but also executes PHPUnit tests. He post also shows how to run Composer in a command and how to document each command. There are also a few handy tips included around running Composer on Windows, listing the current scripts and executing custom callbacks to code.