Composer Basics

If you are a Drupal 8 site builder or developer than you probably already know that you should be using Composer to manager your codebase. This workshop is designed for folks who struggle with using Composer, or who are ready to jump in and use it for the first time. 

The Composer dependency manager can sometimes be a little intimidating - until you learn what is under the hood, then the full power of this tool is fully revealed. In this full-day workshop, we'll learn the basics of Composer to manage a project's dependencies using multiple hands-on examples. 

We'll start with a discussion about exactly what a dependency manager is and why we need one, then we'll build a (non-Drupal) PHP project from scratch using Composer. From there we'll learn to add, remove, and update dependencies. 

Once we know the basics, we'll take a deep dive into the "Drupal Composer/Drupal Project" Composer template - a current best practice for managing Drupal 8 codebases as well as a discussion (and maybe a demo or two) of recent progress of the Drupal Community's Composer Initiative.

Finally, a series of Composer related tips and tricks will be discussed and demonstrated, including additional Composer commands and plugins as well as a discussion about PHP versions and using Composer in a production environment. 

Goals

Understanding the basics of the Composer dependency manager and comfort with best practices related to Drupal and Composer.

Prerequisites: 

• Basic command-line navigation skills.
• Some experience with Git.
• Composer, Git, and PHP7 installed on your local machine.
• A copy of Drupal 8 does not need to be installed on your local machine.