README

Adds ability to link local packages in composer for development.

This plugin won't alter your composer.json or composer.lock file, while maintaining the composer abilities to manage/upgrade your packages.

Requirements

• PHP >= 8.2
• Composer >= 2.6

Installation

This plugin can be installed globally or per project

Globally

composer global require sandersander/composer-link

Per project:

composer require --dev sandersander/composer-link

Usage

The following three commands are made available by this plugin link, unlink and linked. When the plugin is installed globally you can prefix the commands with global as example composer global linked and install global packages.

To link a package you can use the link commands, you can also link a global package. When linked to a global package absolute paths are used, when using a relative path composer-link resolves it to the absolute path.

composer link ../path/to/package
composer link ../path/to/package-one ../path/to/package-two
composer global link ../path/to/package

It's also possible to use a wildcard in your path, note that this will install all packages found in the directory ../packages If you don't want to link all the packages but only the ones originally installed you can pass the --only-installed flag.

composer link ../packages/*
composer link ../packages/* --only-installed

Composer link will automatically install/update the required packages from the linked package, you can prevent this behavior by adding the --without-dependencies flag.

When the composer link or composer unlink are used all packages defined in require-dev of the root package are installed by default, this can be prevented by using the --no-dev flag

To unlink the package you can use the unlink command

composer unlink ../path/to/package
composer unlink ../packages/*
composer unlink ../path/to/package-one ../path/to/package-two
composer global unlink ../path/to/package

You can also unlink all package with the following command

composer unlink-all

To see all linked packages in your project you can use the linked command

composer linked
composer global linked

Configuration

It is also possible to predefine linked packages in your composer.json file. This is useful for projects that always require certain local packages to be linked.

{
    "extra": {
        "composer-link": {
            "paths": [
                "../path-to-package"
            ]
        }
    }
}

The packages defined in paths will be automatically linked when running composer install or composer update. You can still use the composer unlink command to temporarily unlink these packages.

Development

The following tools are available for development. It's also possible to link this package to your global for testing changes.

composer run lint               # Lints all files 
composer run test               # Runs unit tests
composer run phpmd              # Runs phpmd
composer run phpstan            # Runs phpstan
composer run test-integration   # Runs integration tests for linux, this requires docker