PHP Composer and Autoloading

Introduction

Composer is PHP's de facto dependency manager, handling package installation, autoloading, and version management. PSR-4 autoloading eliminates manual require statements by automatically loading classes based on namespace and file structure conventions.

Composer revolutionized PHP development by providing standardized dependency management similar to npm, pip, or Maven. Combined with PSR-4 autoloading, Composer enables modern PHP projects to organize code cleanly, share packages easily, and manage dependencies reliably.

This skill covers Composer basics, dependency management, autoloading strategies, package creation, semantic versioning, and best practices for maintainable PHP projects.

Composer Basics