Working With Composer

This chapter includes a number of helpful commands and best practices for using TYPO3 with Composer.

Run Composer Locally

You should not run composer on your live webspace. You should always run composer on your local or a dedicated deployment machine, so you can test if everything worked fine. After running your tests, you can deploy the vendor and public folder to your web server.

To avoid conflicts between your local and your server's PHP version, you can define your server's PHP version in your composer.json file (e.g. {"platform": {"php": "7.2"}}), so composer will always check the correct dependencies.

Update Packages

After updating any packages, you always should commit your composer.lock to your version control system and your co-workers should run composer install after checking out the updates.

Update all Packages

Run composer update without any other attributes, to update all packages. Composer will always try to install the newest packages that match the defined version constraints.

ノート

Be careful with that. This command may cause negative effects if you do not have proper version constraints in your composer.json. You always should prefer to update your packages separately.

Update Single Packages

When you want to update single packages, you can call composer update with the package name. You should always add --with-all-dependencies attribute to also update the required third party packages.

Update TYPO3 Core

Without "subtree split":

composer update typo3/cms --with-all-dependencies

With "subtree split":

composer update typo3/cms-* --with-all-dependencies

Update Extensions Like "news"

composer update georgringer/news --with-all-dependencies

Use Dev Requirements

Add packages with --dev attribute to add packages only to your local development environment. This is very useful for packages, you do not need or do not want to have on your live server, e.g. PHPUnit or Testing-Frameworks:

composer require typo3/testing-framework:^2.0 --dev

During your deployment routine, you should run composer install with attribute --no-dev. So the dev requirements are not installed.

composer install --no-dev

Remove Extensions

You can use the composer command remove to uninstall extensions or other composer packages.

composer remove georgringer/news

Don't forget to commit your updated composer.lock to your version control system.

ノート

Please be sure to disable extensions in TYPO3's Extension Manager, before removing them with composer. Or ensure to regenerate your typo3conf/PackageStates.php file automatically, after removing the packages. You could use the extension "typo3_console" for that

Check for Available Updates

Run composer outdated to see a list of available updates.

Run composer outdated -D to see a list of available updates for directly required packages.

Useful Packages and Bundles

Simplify "Subtree Split" Installations

Instead of explicitly requiring each core extension, you can require typo3/minimal, which brings the minimal required set of system extensions.

TYPO3 CMS Base Distribution

Primarily, typo3/cms-base-distribution is not meant to be used with composer require, but to really quickly start new composer based TYPO3 projects.

Nevertheless, it's very good to have heard about it. If you're interested in more information, you should check the packages README.

Secure Web

helhum/typo3-secure-web follows the very interesting concept to split the traditional web root directory into two parts: the "public" one for all the resources, that must be directly accessible via HTTP (images, styles, etc.) - and the "private" folder, where all the PHP will be located.

This helps to make your TYPO3 installations even more secure!