Composer require local package

The way to link to a local, in-development package is to first add in your main project's composer.json a repository, like this:

"repositories": [ { "type": "path", "url": "/full/or/relative/path/to/development/package" } ] 

You also need to either have a version specified in your development package's composer.json or the way I do it is to require the package using @dev, like this:

composer require "vendorname/packagename @dev" 

It should output:

- Installing vendor/packagename (dev-develop) Symlinked from /full/or/relative/path/to/development/package 

The @dev in the require command is important, composer uses this to pickup the source code and symlink it to your new package.

It's a stability flag added to the version constraint (see package link).

These allow you to further restrict or expand the stability of a package beyond the scope of the minimum-stability setting.

The minimum-stability flags are:

Available options (in order of stability) are dev, alpha, beta, RC, and stable.

After spending some time, I finally understood the solution. Maybe it'll be useful for someone like me and will save you some time, so I've decided that I have to share it here.

Assuming that you have the following directory structure (relative to your project root directory):

composer.json config config/composition-root.php local local/bar-project local/bar-project/composer.json local/bar-project/src local/bar-project/src/Bar.php public public/index.php src src/Foo.php 

In this example you may see that the local folder is meant for nested projects of your company, e.g. bar-project. But you could configure any other layout, if you wish.

Each project has to have its own composer.json file, e.g. root composer.json and local/bar-project/composer.json. Then their contents would be as follows:

(root composer.json:)

{ "name": "your-company/foo-project", "require": { "php": "^7", "your-company/bar-project": "@dev" }, "autoload": { "psr-4": { "YourCompany\\FooProject\\": "src/" } }, "repositories": [ { "type": "path", "url": "local/bar-project" } ] } 

(local/bar-project/composer.json:)

{ "name": "your-company/bar-project", "autoload": { "psr-4": { "YourCompany\\BarProject\\": "src/" } } } 

If, for example, you wish to locate each project in a separate sibling directory, as follows:

your-company your-company/foo-project your-company/foo-project/composer.json your-company/foo-project/config your-company/foo-project/config/composition-root.php your-company/foo-project/public your-company/foo-project/public/index.php your-company/foo-project/src your-company/foo-project/src/Foo.php your-company/bar-project your-company/bar-project/composer.json your-company/bar-project/src your-company/bar-project/src/Bar.php 

- then you need to link to respective directory in repositories section:

 "repositories": [ { "type": "path", "url": "../bar-project" } ] 

After that don't forget to composer update (or even rm -rf vendor && composer update -v as the docs suggest)! Under the hood, composer will create a vendor/your-company/bar-project symlink that targets to local/bar-project (or ../bar-project respectively).

Assuming that your public/index.php is just a front controller, e.g.:

<?php require_once __DIR__ . '/../config/composition-root.php'; 

Then your config/composition-root.php would be:

<?php declare(strict_types=1); use YourCompany\BarProject\Bar; use YourCompany\FooProject\Foo; require_once __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php'; $bar = new Bar(); $foo = new Foo($bar); $foo->greet(); 

The command line way to do this is

composer config repositories.package_name local path/to/package composer require group/package_name 

If the group/package_name is available both from repository and local, the local version is used.

The local command can be replaced with vcs to reference a direct repository, or composer for default.