Composer

Page last updated: July 27, 2015

Composer is activated when you supply a composer.json or composer.lock file. A composer.lock is not required, but is strongly recommended for consistent deployments.

You can require dependencies for packages and extensions. Extensions must be prefixed with the standard ext-. If you reference an extension that is available to the buildpack, it will automatically be installed. See the main README for a list of supported extensions.

The buildpack uses the version of PHP specified in your composer.json or composer.lock file. Composer settings override the version set in the options.json file.

The PHP buildpack supports a subset of the version formats supported by Composer. The buildpack supported formats are:

Configuration

The buildpack runs with a set of default values for Composer. You can adjust these values by adding a .bp-config/options.json file to your application and setting any of the following values in it.

By default, the PHP buildpack uses the composer.json and composer.lock files that reside inside the root directory, or in the directory specified as WEBDIR in your options.json. If you have composer files inside your app, but not in the default directories, use a COMPOSER_PATH environment variable for your app to specify this custom location, relative to the app root directory. Note that the composer.json and composer.lock files must be in the same directory.

Github API Request Limits

Composer uses Github’s API to retrieve zip files for installation into the application folder. If you do not vendor dependencies before pushing an app, Composer will fetch dependencies during staging using the Github API.

Github’s API is request-limited. If you reach your daily allowance of API requests (typically 60), Github’s API returns a 403 error and staging fails.

There are two ways to avoid the request limit:

1. Vendor dependencies before pushing your application.
2. Supply a Github OAuth API token.

Vendoring Dependencies

To vendor dependencies, you must run composer install before you push your application. You might also need to configure COMPOSER_VENDOR_DIR to “vendor”.

Supply a Github Token

Composer can use Github API OAuth tokens, which increase your request limit, typically to 5000 per day.

During staging, the buildpack looks for this token in the environment variable COMPOSER_GITHUB_OAUTH_TOKEN. If you supply a valid token, Composer uses it. This mechanism does not work if the token is invalid.

To supply the token, you can use either of the following methods:

1. cf set-env YOUR_APP_NAME COMPOSER_GITHUB_OAUTH_TOKEN "OAUTH_TOKEN_VALUE"
2. Add the token to the env block of your application manifest.

Staging Environment

Composer runs in the buildpack staging environment. Variables set with cf set-env or with a manifest.yml ‘env’ block are visible to Composer.

For example:

$ cf push a_symfony_app --no-start
$ cf set-env a_symfony_app SYMFONY_ENV "prod"
$ cf start a_symfony_app

In this example, a_symfony_app is supplied with an environment variable, SYMFONY_ENV, which is visible to Composer and any scripts started by Composer.

Non-configurable Environment Variables

User-assigned environment variables are applied to staging and runtime. Unfortunately, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PHPRC must be different for staging and runtime. The buildpack takes care of setting these variables, which means user values for these variables are ignored.