How to develop a dependent composer package without the need to commit or publish changes?

Question

I have an application A which has a composer.json file defining a dependency on package P, which is my own new shiny package. My package P has a composer.json file, which de

Answer 1

The solution I use when I'm in a situation where I need to work on multiple packages at the same time, is to register each package locally and after composer install or after first composer update I remove that package from vendor directory and symlink it to location where I store the local "WIP" version.

For example:

• In composer.json I require my_vendor/packageA, which is registered locally inside ~/.composer/config.json.
• I execute composer update my_vendor/packageA to make composer aware of my new package.
• After composer finishes installing my package:
  • cd vendor/my_vendor && rm -rf packageA && ln -s ../../../packageA .

Which will leave me with something like:

• working_dir/
  • packageA/ (this is where I work on packageA)
  • projectA/
    • app
    • src
    • vendor/
      • vendor1/
      • vendor2/
      • my_vendor/
        • packageA -> ../../../packageA

This allows me:

• To change packageA even from inside my vendor dir
• I don't need to commit to packageA before I can use those changes inside my projectA.

When packageA will be stable enough, the symlink will be removed and everything will come back to normal, using the version from VCS/packagist.

I tried different solutions over the time and I found that the above works best for me.

An alternative solution which I use when I can, is to register PSR-0 directories manually, for each prefix:

<?php

$autoloader = require_once __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php';
$autoloader->add('MyVendor\\Dummy\\', '/path/to/dummy-component/src');

// now you can use MyVendor\Dummy as normal.

Note: For PSR-4 there is addPsr4() method.