Cross system composer package installing - composer-php

Question

I have a linux web server with set of different users who have specific access to different virtual hosts.
All of these users belongs to one common group “www-data” ( apache ) and I want each of theses users be able to use the packages installed by composer. Sort of the same as the Debian packages installed via “apt-get” package manager...
So far I have tried installing composer the packages as super user but the executables becomes inaccessible for other users.
Linking the
.composer/vendor/bin/package-name
to
/usr/bin
or
/usr/local/bin
doesn't work so I am wondering if the composer is designed to redundantly install composer packages for each specific user?
If not what is the confinguration of the composer.json to redirect the package installation to
/usr/bin
instead of keeping them locked in
.composer/vendor/bin
?

Answer 1

Composer is proposing individual installation of packages per application. It is explicitly NOT designed to be like PEAR with a central installation of packages to be used, because this usually is a pain to update.
So when it comes to your users making use of their own virtual host, they should be able to put all of the files needed into their webspace independent of everyone else.
Now I was thinking about you providing the useful stuff like a centrally managed copy of Composer or other utilities, but I'd rather not because it's likely a bad idea.
Composer isn't an installer. It shouldn't be used as the tool grabbing all the files and put them onto the production machine. It's more like a developer tool to manage dependencies. Using Composer on your server means that people are using your server as a development environment. If this is true, they have the right to have Composer installed, but they should be able to do it on their own.
The other thing is with utilities like PHPUnit or Phing. While I think that some of them might be useful, the problem with a central installation is that it'll never be the right version. For example, if you'd provide PHPUnit, you can either go with the newest 4.6 and upset the users who still use the old 3.x, or provide that old 3.7 version and upset users who need the 4.x series. The same applies to Phing, to a lesser extent.

Answer 2

So far, my solution has been to run a system-wide composer, installed to /usr/local/bin/composer, with a working-directory in /usr/local/lib/composer/. I then configure the bin_dir to /usr/local/bin to have composer automatically symlink the package binaries.
My problem, so far, is that composer creates the vendor files with restricted permissions for all users (640 and 750). My workaround is to chmod all I need.
It goes like this:
# install composer
sudo wget https://getcomposer.org/composer.phar --output-document=/usr/local/bin/composer
# setup composer home
sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/composer
sudo touch /usr/local/lib/composer.json
# configure composer
sudo composer config bin-dir /usr/local/lib --working-dir=/usr/local/lib/composer
# install packages (drush, for example)
sudo composer require drush/drush:7.* --working-dir=/usr/local/lib/composer
# fix permissions
sudo find /usr/local/lib/composer -perm 640 -exec chmod 644 {} \;
sudo find /usr/local/lib/composer -perm 750 -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Answer 3

To make the installed packages usable by any system user we have to create a composer.json located in the add-on packages directory (/opt/composer) and run the “composer install” command from there.
Ex:
cat /opt/composer/composer.json
{
"require": {
"squizlabs/php_codesniffer": "*",
"phploc/phploc": "*",
"pdepend/pdepend" : "2.1.0",
"phpmd/phpmd" : "*",
"nikic/php-parser" : "*",
"theseer/phpdox": "*",
"sebastian/phpcpd": "*"
},
"require-dev": {
"phploc/phploc": "*",
"phpmd/phpmd" : "#stable"
},
"config": {
"bin-dir": "/usr/local/bin"
}
}