The SitePoint PHP blog has a post about a feature Composer provides to help make tools and libraries easier to use - the ability to install things globally. In this post editor Bruno Skvorc wonders if this feature should be "considered harmful" and a bad practice.

We’ve discussed Composer best practices before, and I’ve always advocated using composer global require when installing packages that can be used across several projects – particularly command line tools. Then, the other day, I ran into this discussion. The short of it is – the majority of people now seem to feel like global require is bad practice, unless the globally installed package has zero dependencies.

The article he references offers an alternative option however: install locally to the project and just update your paths to allow for it to be easily found. This can be difficult and hard to maintain so Bruno offers a counter-suggestion, the "[consolidation/cgr]"(https://github.com/consolidation-org/cgr) tool. This tool handles the "global" install in a way that still isolates it and then automatically updates your .bash_aliases with the command and path to make it easier to use.