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Composer Monorepo Plugin

Note: this project is still experimental. Please provide feedback!

This plugin adds support for Monorepos when using Composer package manager. It introduces a maintainable approach to managing dependencies for multiple packages in a single repository, without losing the benefits of having explicit dependencies for each separate package.

Repositories managed with this plugin contain two kinds of packages:

  1. Composer packages defined by a single global composer.json with all external dependencies at the root of the repository.
  2. Many monorepo packages in sub-folders of the project, each with its own monorepo.json, a simplified composer.json file.

Dependencies in monorepos can be either a third party Composer package that is listed in the composer.json or a monorepo package contained in the project.

This plugins build step generates autoloaders with vendor/autoload.php files for each package with access to the explicitly specified dependencies only.

The following steps are performed by this plugin when building the autoloads:

  1. It detects monorepo.json files in subdirectories excluding vendor/ and marks them as roots of packages.
  2. It then fetches all composer packages from the locally installed packages.
  3. Finally for each package with monorepo.json it generates a vendor/autoload.php file using all the dependencies defined in that package from either other monorepo packages or regular Composer packages.

This plugin draws inspiration from Google Blaze/Bazel and Facebook Buck implementing a single monolithic repository for whole projects/company. It's the missing piece for the monolithic repository workflow using PHP and Composer.

More details about reasoning on Gregory Szorc's blog:

Backwards Incompatible Changes in v0.12

In v0.12 we removed the fiddler script and the possibility to build a PHAR archive. This project is now a first-class composer plugin only and requires Composer v1.1+ for the composer monorepo: commands to be available.

The fiddler.json files must be renamed to monorepo.json.

Use v0.11.6 or lower if you don't want to break this in your project yet.

Installation

Add the composer monorepo plugin to your root composer.json with:

$ composer require beberlei/composer-monorepo-plugin

It will be automatically added as a Composer plugin.

Usage

Whenever Composer generates autoload files (during install, update or dump-autoload) it will find all sub-directories with monorepo.json files and generate sub-package autoloaders for them.

You can execute the autoload generation step for just the subpackages by calling:

$ composer monorepo:build

You create a composer.json file in the root of your project and use this single source of vendor libraries across all of your own packages.

This sounds counter-intuitive to the Composer approach at first, but it simplifies dependency management for a big project massively. Usually if you are using a composer.json per package, you have mass update sprees where you upate some basic library like "symfony/dependency-injection" in 10-20 packages or worse, have massively out of date packages and many different versions everywhere.

Then, each of your own package contains a monorepo.json using almost the same syntax as Composer:

{
    "deps": [
        "components/Foo",
        "vendor/symfony/symfony"
    ],
    "autoload": {
        "psr-0": {"Foo\\": "src/"}
    }
}

You can then run composer dump-autoload in the root directory next to composer.json and this plugin will detect all packages, generate a custom autoloader for each one by simulating composer dump-autoload as if a composer.json were present in the subdirectory.

This plugin will resolve all dependencies (without version constraints, because it is assumed the code is present in the correct versions in a monolithic repository).

Package names in deps are the relative directory names from the project root, not Composer package names.

You can just require "vendor/autoload.php; in every package as if you were using Composer. Only autoloads from the monorepo.json are included, which means all dependencies must be explicitly specified.

Configuration Schema monorepo.json

For each package in your monolithic repository you have to add monorepo.json that borrows from composer.json format. The following keys are usable:

Git Integration for Builds

In a monorepo, for every git commit range you want to know which components changed. You can test with the git-changed? command:

composer monorepo:git-changed? components/foo $TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then ant build fi