Uncommon (Ab)Uses of Composer
Composer is far more than a dependency manager. Its plugin system lets external code hook into the execution flow, which opens the door to solving problems it was never designed for. A quick tour of the mechanisms behind that flexibility, then useful and downright exotic ways to bend Composer.
Composer is a hugely flexible tool that works reliably on all but the most obscure hosters/platforms. What’s more, it provides a plugin system that lets you pull external code from a repository and have that code hook into the normal Composer execution flow. The logical conclusion is that Composer is used for much more than just pulling in dependencies.
We’ll start this session with a quick look at the basic mechanisms that make Composer as flexible as it is. Then, we’ll go through some of the more useful and/or exotic examples of how to use Composer for solving problems that it wasn’t really meant to solve.