In his latest post Piotr Pasich shares some handy tips (and tools) to help you use Composer to do some of the common tasks you might use Ant or Phing for.

I decided to start with something uncomplicated – a simple solution that could help me solve a prosaic, but annoying issue. For instance, XML format. No, I won’t fight with it. I see it as great and practical, however mostly I don’t need so sophisticated code to cover my needs – the yaml usually fits the purpose. [...] Yet, do I really need this flexibility [of XML configuration] when I use vagrant or docker to maintain the same environment as on the production? For 90% of PHP projects probably I won’t use all of the features of the virtualization tools. I only want to install necessary libraries, check the code quality before committing or introduce fixtures. Most of those points are easily feasible in composer.

He then shows how to execute these checks through the functionality included with Composer to run custom scripts. His example measures the quality of the code based on the results first from a single run of the PHP Mess Detector (phpmd) command. He then extends this with the open source contribution he mentions earlier with his CodeQualityThreshold library allowing not only for more checks (phpmd, phpcs, phpcpd, etc) but also allows you to configure the thresholds for each class if desired. He includes an example of it in action and screenshots of the results.