Taking Composer From Good to Great: Advanced Techniques for Modern PHP Projects

Speed up builds, enforce PSR standards, and fortify your PHP supply chain with Composer’s newest power features.

Photo by Leone Venter on Unsplash

Composer has been the de-facto dependency manager for PHP for more than a decade, but over the last few versions it has quietly evolved into a full-blown build tool, complete with strict PSR enforcement, security auditing, script orchestration, and provenance attestation. Below is a tour of the features that move Composer from good enough to production-grade.

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1. Modern Autoloading: More Than Just PSR-4

1.1 Strict PSR validation

Since Composer 2.7 you can ask the autoloader to fail fast when a class violates PSR-4/0 expectations by combining --strict-psr with an authoritative class map:

composer dump-autoload --classmap-authoritative --strict-psr

This catches subtle namespace/path mismatches before they ship.

1.2 Authoritative class maps

Setting

{
  "config": {…