mindplay/composer-locator

⚠️ DEPRECATED: use Composer Runtime Utilities

This Composer plugin provides a means of locating the installation path for a given Composer package name.

Use this to locate vendor package roots, e.g. when working with template files or other assets in a package, locating and discovering plugins, and so on.

It works regardless of installers affecting the individual package installation paths, and also works whether the package in question is currently the root package/project or a dependency.

Usage

Add to your composer.json file:

{
    "require": {
        "mindplay/composer-locator": "^2"
    },
    "config": {
        "allow-plugins": {
            "mindplay/composer-locator": true
        }
    }
}

Running composer install or composer update will bootstrap your project with a generated class containing a registry of Composer package installation paths.

To obtain the installation path for given package:

$path = ComposerLocator::getPath("vendor/package"); // => "/path/to/vendor/package" 

If the specified package name is not found, the function throws a RuntimeException.

To check whether a given package is installed:

$is_installed = ComposerLocator::isInstalled("vendor/package"); // => (bool) true|false 

The root Composer project package doesn't necessarily have a package name - to get the root path of the root Composer project, without specifying the package name:

$path = ComposerLocator::getRootPath(); // => "/path/to/project/root" 

You can also get a list of all installed packages via ComposerLocator::getPackages(), or obtain a full key/value map of package-names to absolute root paths via ComposerLocator::getPaths().

Why?

Needing to know the root path of a package installation folder is quite a common requirement, such as when you need to specify paths to template files or other assets.

The problem is that Composer itself offers no simple and reliable way to do that.

You can use reflection to get the path to a known class or interface from the package, and then dirname() up from your src folder to the package installation root, but that approach isn't very robust, since the location of a class file may change from one version to another.

Even if you know the path of the vendor root folder, and the {vendor}/{package} folder name convention, there is no guarantee that's always where packages are installed - something like composer-installers could affect the installation paths.

Also, when developing a library, during testing and development, the package will be installed as the root/project package, but this path will be different when it's installed as a dependency in another project.