In a post to his site Keith Mifsud shares his recommendations around a good workflow for developing PHP applications. Composer and GitHub play a part in the process as does the use of Git and your IDE of choice.

Continuing from the previous post Developing a Command Bus in PHP, we will look into how to get started in setting up our composer library project. Although my PHP software development workflow does vary slightly from project to project, most steps are more or less the same. Whether your project is the result of a successful proposal or you want to build an open source composer package like we’re doing here, this post will guide you in working with PHP the right way. If you are learning PHP from scratch and find that I am missing some intermediary steps or making assumptions, please feel welcome to comment below and I’ll be more than happy to explain in more detail.

He then walks through the steps in the process, each with explanation (and screenshots where appropriate):

• Getting organized and planning the application features
• Creating the GitHub repository and setting up the Kanban board
• Defining a release milestone
• Setting up a local Homestead instance for development
• Setting up Git and your IDE

The final step is to create the composer.json configuration file that defines the basic information about the project, any dependencies and the autoloading paths.