README

#fido

A simple composer plugin that simplifies installing packages without dependency management support (e.g. assets from URLs or git repositories).

Installation

Because of composer's plugin system, you need to install fido globally

composer global require "rtens/fido:~1.0"

(there is a pull request to fix that)

Usage

The requirement definitions go into the extra object using the ke fido-fetch. Here is an example with two packages.

"extra": {
    "fido-fetch": {
        "base-dir": "web/assets/vendor", // defaults to "assets/vendor"
        "jquery": {
            "source": "https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.1.js",
            "type": "file", // optional, inferred from source
            "target": "jquery.js" // Optional, defaults to file name
        },
        "phantom.js runner": {
            "source": "https://github.com/jonkemp/qunit-phantomjs-runner.git",
            "type": "git", // optional, inferred from source
            "target": "phantomjs-runner", // Optional, defaults to repository name
            "reference": "v1.2.0" // optional, defaults to "*"
        }
    }
}

This can be shortened in several steps. First, by leaving out the optional definitions.

"extra": {
    "fido-fetch": {
        "jquery": {
            "source": "https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.1.js",
        },
        "phantom.js runner": {
            "source": "https://github.com/jonkemp/qunit-phantomjs-runner.git",
        }
    }
}

To shorten it even more, the value of source can be used as package names.

"extra": {
    "fido-fetch": {
        "https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.1.js": {},
        "https://github.com/jonkemp/qunit-phantomjs-runner.git": {}
    }
}

Finally, these definitions can also be put into the require object (including versions for git repositories) by prefixing them with fido-fetch:.

"require": {
    "fido-fetch:https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.1.js": "*",
    "fido-fetch:https://github.com/jonkemp/qunit-phantomjs-runner.git": "v1.2.0"
}

Dev Mode

You can also specify packages for dev-mode only using the fetch-fido-dev and require-dev objects.

Documentation

For a complete documentation, check out fido's executable documentation

But.. why?

Convenience, mostly.

There are of course several ways to get bootstrap, jquery and their likes into your project without bundling them with it. You could use bower or npm for example or, if you don't like javascript, you can get the the excellent bower/npm composer plugin.

But some packages, like the qunit-phantomjs-runner, don't support any dependency management system. For these cases exists composer's package type repository (thanks Igor for pointing that out).

Now if you would like to have these packages in another directory than vendor, you can either symlink to them or use the composer-custom-directory-installer plugin which lets you decide where certain packages should be installed.

This is how the composer.json looks like with if you would require bootstrap and the qunit-phantomjs-runner with this approach:

{
    "require": {
        "mnsami/composer-custom-directory-installer": "1.0.*",
        "jquery":"2.1.1",
        "jonkemp/qunit-phantomjs-runner":"1.1.0"
    },
    "extra": {
        "installer-paths":{
            "web/assets/jquery/jquery.js": ["jquery"],
            "web/assets/phantomjs-runner": ["jonkemp/qunit-phantomjs-runner"]
        }
    },
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "package",
            "package": {
                "name": "jquery",
                "version": "2.1.1",
                "dist": {
                    "url": "https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.1.js",
                    "type": "file"
                }
            }
        },
        {
            "type": "package",
            "package": {
                "name": "jonkemp/qunit-phantomjs-runner",
                "version": "1.1.0",
                "source": {
                    "url": "https://github.com/jonkemp/qunit-phantomjs-runner.git",
                    "type": "git",
                    "reference": "tags/v1.1.0"
                }
            }
        }
    ],
    "minimum-stability": "dev"
}

And this is actually (more or less) what fido compiles to, simply with a shorter, simpler syntax.