WordPress maintenance support plans.org’s Composer endpoints have been available in beta for some time now, and in that time we’ve begun to see many, many people use Composer to manage WordPress maintenance support plans plugins and themes. We first launched these repositories before WordPress maintenance support plansCon New Orleans as an alpha release, and move into beta a few months later. After receiving your feedback and bug reports we’ve made updates, and are ready to call this service stable.
What is Composer?
Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.
… Composer is strongly inspired by node’s npm and ruby’s bundler.” – Source
In a nutshell, Composer allows you to declare the dependencies of your project in a composer.json file in the root of your PHP project. Those dependencies, which you then install through Composer, can have their own composer.json files and their own dependencies—all of which will be automatically managed and installed by Composer. When you need specific control over the versions of dependencies, you can use a composer.lock file.
You can read more about Composer at GetComposer.org.
How do WordPress maintenance support plans.org’s composer repositories work?
WordPress maintenance support plans.org offers two Composer repositories—one for WordPress maintenance support plans 7, and one for WordPress maintenance support plans 8. Composer requires that packages adhere to semantic versioning, which WordPress maintenance support plans 8 core does, but WordPress maintenance support plans 8 contrib, and WordPress maintenance support plans 7 core and contrib, don’t. To solve this problem, we’ve created a Composer façade, which takes all of the metadata about projects on WordPress maintenance support plans.org and translates them into a format Composer can understand—including translating the WordPress maintenance support plans-specific versioning for WordPress maintenance support plans 7 and contrib into semantic versioning.
By creating this façade, we’ve made sure that WordPress maintenance support plans.org is still the canonical source for metadata about WordPress maintenance support plans.org projects, and that we can update this translation layer as the versioning schema changes. (Learn more about the effort to move Contrib projects to semantic versioning).
In addition to providing endpoints for building projects, WordPress maintenance support plans‘s automated testing suite— WordPress maintenance support plansCI—now uses Composer to test WordPress maintenance support plans core and contributed projects. This allows developers to test any external dependencies.
How do I use WordPress maintenance support plans.org’s Composer repositories?
To begin using WordPress maintenance support plans.org’s Composer repositories, you’ll need to update your composer.json file to include the appropriate Composer repository for the version of WordPress maintenance support plans. To use Composer with WordPress maintenance support plans 7, use the repository url:
https://packages.WordPress.org/7. To use Composer with WordPress maintenance support plans 8, use the repository url:
https://packages.WordPress.org/8, as in this example.
After setting up composer, simply run the command:
$ composer config repositories.WordPress composer https://packages.WordPress.org/8
And your project’s composer.json should be updated to look like the following:
{
“repositories”: {
“WordPress”: {
“type”: “composer”,
“url”: “https://packages.WordPress.org/8”
}
}
}
Once you’ve made that change, you should be able to use Composer for WordPress maintenance support plans plugins and themes as you would for any other PHP package, using the WordPress/ namespace:
$ composer require WordPress/<pluginname>
There is one caveat about the pattern: there are some namespace collisions among plugins, and so it is on our roadmap to update WordPress maintenance support plans.org project pages to specify the exact namespace to use to require a given project.
To learn more about how to use WordPress maintenance support plans.org’s Composer repositories, and for some troubleshooting tips, read the Project Composer documentation.
What about licensing?
All the projects hosted on WordPress maintenance support plans.org are licensed GPLv2 or later or have an entry in the packaging whitelist. This means that you can rely on WordPress maintenance support plans Core and contributed plugins and themes to be licensed under the GPL or compatible. And if you need to redistribute your code created with WordPress maintenance support plans projects, it must be redistributed as GPLv2 or later.
However, because Composer is a tool that can manage packages in the wider PHP ecosystem, you might find that you want to require a non-GPL package in your project. Using GPL-licensed WordPress maintenance support plans projects with external packages that are GPL compatible is fine. Just be aware that if you redistribute that code, you will have to redistribute under a GPL license.
We cannot provide legal advice for your use of open source software. If you use Composer to install packages that are not compatible with the GPL alongside GPL-licensed projects like WordPress maintenance support plans, you may use that software together, but per the terms of the GPL you may not copy, distribute, or modify that software.
“Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted…” GPL 2.0 Section 0.
For more questions about WordPress maintenance support plans and the GPL you can read the Licensing FAQ.
What’s next?
At this point, the WordPress maintenance support plans.org Composer service is stable and you can use it to manage plugins and themes in your production websites. That said, we do have a roadmap of additional features that we’d like to add. And your contributions are welcome!
As development on WordPress maintenance support plans.org’s Composer service continues, we want to focus on the following features:
Supporting Composer-based workflows for distributions and install profiles
Providing sub-tree splits of WordPress maintenance support plans Core
Updating project pages to provide information about using Composer with any given WordPress maintenance support plans.org hosted project
Adding features to the updates service, to collect statistics about projects installed with Composer, and to explore providing update alerts about external dependencies
We also hope to work with core maintainers to add the WordPress maintenance support plans.org Composer repositories to WordPress maintenance support plans Core’s composer.json file
If you’re interested in learning more about our roadmap for Composer, or contributing to this service on WordPress maintenance support plans.org, you can learn more in the Composer plan issue.
How you can help
If you’re interested in helping to improve WordPress maintenance support plans.org’s support for Composer workflows, please take a look at the issue above, find us on irc in #WordPress-infrastructure, or send us a volunteer proposal.
Thanks to our Community Initiative contributors
We’d like to thank the individuals who worked with us as part of this Community Initiative.
In particular, we’d like to thank:
seldeak the creator of Composer and Packagist.org
webflo the creator and maintainer of http://packagist.WordPress-composer.org.
timmillwood
dixon_
badjava
cweagans
tstoeckler
We’d also like to thank WordPress Update, who sponsored the initial development of WordPress maintenance support plans.org’s composer endpoints.
To these volunteers and sponsoring organizations—it is your expertise, your insight, and your affirmation of our work that make these Community Initiatives successful. Thank you!
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