Composer WordPress.org Plugins

I’ve recently been introduced to managing WordPress.org plugins via Composer. This makes it more convenient when excluding plugins from your working repository. Composer is capable of doing far more than managing plugins but at this point, that is the extent of how I’m using it.

This allows me to exclude my plugins via .gitignore yet check in my composer.json file, allowing me to quickly install the correct plugins in a newly cloned instance.

Install Composer

You can install composer with the following line.

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php;mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Composer Configuration

Create a file called composer.json in the root of your project. This file includes the list of plugins you want to manage via Composer. Here is an example file that manages two plugins WordPress SEO and Simple Google Analytics Tracking.

Install Plugins

After your composer.json file is in place, from the command line run

composer install

This reads your composer.json file and creates your plugins in the wp-content/plugins/ directory.

The install command also creates a directory called vendor. You can ignore this directory, both in the sense of not paying attention to it and making sure your .gitignore excludes it from your repository.

Plugins Not on WordPress.org

For plugins not on WordPress.org, Composer can be used to load the plugin directly from a Git repo. I wrote about how I do this in my post Loading a Private WordPress Plugin with Composer.

Sal Ferrarello (@salcode)

Sal is a PHP developer with a focus on the WordPress platform. He is a conference speaker with a background including Piano Player, Radio DJ, Magician/Juggler, Beach Photographer, and High School Math Teacher. Sal can be found professionally at WebDevStudios, where he works as a senior backend engineer.