How to Build Your First PHP Package

Want to create a PHP package from scratch and share it with other PHP developers? Composer, this dependency management tool, makes this process easy! Thanks to Composer, PHP has one of the top package ecosystems. Let's take a deeper look at how to create PHP packages step by step.

Get started

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This article is mainly aimed at PHP newbies (or PHP package writing beginners), and aims to help them learn how to create PHP packages from scratch.

Creating a new PHP package requires the following tasks:

• Initialize the Git repository
• Create and configure composer.jsonFile
• Installing dependencies
• Setting automatic loading

While we can create an empty GitHub project first and clone it locally, we will create a new folder directly locally, initialize the project, and then push the source code to GitHub later:

$ mkdir example-package
$ cd ./example-package
$ git init
$ echo "/vendor/" >> .gitignore
$ composer init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m"第一次提交"
# 稍后您可以添加远程仓库并推送源代码

The

composer init command will guide you to set up projects interactively, set package names, authors, licenses, etc. values, and search for package dependencies. You can fill in this information as you like, but for the sake of brevity, here is where we start:

{
    "name": "laravelnews/feeds",
    "description": "获取Laravel-News.com的文章",
    "type": "library",
    "require": {}
}

We have the basic configuration of the package, but it won't do much work. If the package only uses the core PHP language, some packages do not require any dependencies. Regardless, you need to set up automatic loading so that your package users can load functions and classes in their projects.

When you are ready to connect your local checkout to a version control system like GitHub, you can follow the instructions for adding a remote repository. It may be similar to the following command:

git remote add origin git@github.com:laravelnews/example-package.git

Setting automatic loading

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After creating the basic

, we can continue to create the source code. You need to decide where to store the source code in your project. Folders can be named at will, but the typical "standard" is composer.json or src/. Composer doesn't care which path you are using, but you need to instruct Composer to automatically load the file using PSR-4. Let's use the lib/ folder and create a class for our sample package: src

$ mkdir src/
$ touch src/Api.php

Next, open the

file and use the composer.json key to configure the autoloader: "autoload"

The properties in the

{
    "name": "laravelnews/feeds",
    "description": "获取Laravel-News.com的文章",
    "type": "library",
    "require": {},
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "LaravelNews\Feed\": "src/"
        }
    }
}

key map the PHP namespace to a folder. When we create files in the autoload.psr-4 folder, they are mapped to the src namespace. For this example, we create a LaravelNewsFeed file that requests and returns a Laravel News JSON feed. If you are learning, add the following code to Api.php: src/Api.php

<?php namespace LaravelNews\Feed;

class Api
{
    public function json(): array
    {
        $json = file_get_contents('https://laravel-news.com/feed/json');

        return json_decode($json, true);
    }
}

How do we try our new class right away?

There are several ways, such as requiring this package in another project via a local Composer dependency, and even pushing the code to GitHub and executing dev-main on our package. However, we can also try it by creating a composer update file in the root directory of the project: index.php

$ mkdir example-package
$ cd ./example-package
$ git init
$ echo "/vendor/" >> .gitignore
$ composer init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m"第一次提交"
# 稍后您可以添加远程仓库并推送源代码

We used Composer's autoloader, which knows how to load the files of our package. In order for Composer to understand how to find our files, we need to run

:composer install

{
    "name": "laravelnews/feeds",
    "description": "获取Laravel-News.com的文章",
    "type": "library",
    "require": {}
}

You can also run the

command after adding the namespace to composer.json to update the Composer's autoloader. dump-autoload

Run the

file allows us to quickly start using our packages, however, we can also start using our code by creating a test suite. Let's dig into how to set it up! index.php

Package Testing and Development Dependencies

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I recommend writing tests for any project you are involved in, and I like to set up tests as early as possible. The most common testing framework when creating PHP packages is PHPUnit. My favorite choice lately is Pest PHP, and I think you'll love how it's easy to set up!

The

Composer package has two sets of requirements: the

part contains the packages required for the package to run, and the require part contains the packages required for the test. So far we don't have any require-dev packages, which can happen if you don't need other package dependencies. require

I doubt you don't want to write your own test framework from scratch, so we're about to install our first development dependency. We also don't always want to make requests to real-time JSON endpoints, so we will also install a mock library (Mockery) to simulate HTTP calls:

git remote add origin git@github.com:laravelnews/example-package.git

Tip: I recommend configuring package sorting with the following configuration options in

to keep the dependencies organized: composer.json

$ mkdir src/
$ touch src/Api.php

After installing Pest and Mockery, we can initialize Pest through the

flag. After creating the file, we can run --init to test our code: pest

{
    "name": "laravelnews/feeds",
    "description": "获取Laravel-News.com的文章",
    "type": "library",
    "require": {},
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "LaravelNews\Feed\": "src/"
        }
    }
}

You can organize the tests of the package the way you want, and I recommend you check out the Pest documentation for full details about setting up Pest.

Next, let's create a simple class that we can use to demonstrate package testing. This class will get the latest articles from the Laravel News JSON feed and return to the latest articles.

We named this fictional class

and added it to the NewsChecker file with the following content: src/NewsChecker.php

<?php namespace LaravelNews\Feed;

class Api
{
    public function json(): array
    {
        $json = file_get_contents('https://laravel-news.com/feed/json');

        return json_decode($json, true);
    }
}

Note that it takes the

class as a dependency and we will mock it in our tests. Api

Next, we will create this file in the

file and add the following test to verify the tests/Feature/NewsCheckerTest.php method: latestArticle()

$ mkdir example-package
$ cd ./example-package
$ git init
$ echo "/vendor/" >> .gitignore
$ composer init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m"第一次提交"
# 稍后您可以添加远程仓库并推送源代码

You can run these tests and verify that the code is valid by running vendor/bin/pest. You can delete the sample tests created after running pest --init as you like.

We have covered a lot of things, from initializing Git repositories, configuring PHP packages with composer.json, adding source code and testing, and running them with Pest. From here, you can post your package on Packagist!

Learn more

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I recommend you sign up and check out the documentation on Packagist.org where you will release a new version of the package. The process of updating package versions on Packagist can be automated, meaning that when you tag a new version of a package, they will automatically appear on Packagist.org.

We have learned step by step about creating packages from scratch, but if you use GitHub, creating a template repository for your organization or personal projects can be done faster! There are some community-stellar package frameworks that can be used as a starting point for your next Composer package:

{
    "name": "laravelnews/feeds",
    "description": "获取Laravel-News.com的文章",
    "type": "library",
    "require": {}
}

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