It seems most answers on this thread are not "in the know". I am new to Composer myself, but these answers are misleading. The question could simply be stated as: "How can I develop a composer package".
Yes, you could use a custom repository or upload an unfinished package and update it after every change. That neither is the correct solution or the answer to the question.
It doesn't help that Composer's official documentation doesn't state this upfront, but you can see the heading on the Libraries documentation page:
Every project is a package
This is very important to understand
composer.json:
The previously mentioned page goes on to state:
In order to make that package installable you need to give it a name. You do this by adding the name property in composer.json
{
"name": "acme/hello-world",
"require": {
"monolog/monolog": "1.0.*"
}
}
In this example so far, we have a required package, and now a name. Note the vendor/name
format.
So now to autoloading our own files, which is documented on the Basic usage page.
{
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {"Acme\\": "src/"}
}
}
This will autoload the namespaced class files under the src/Acme
directory.
On to the fun.
Install/Update
Install or update the package with the command:
composer update
or
php composer.phar update
This will download the required packages and create the autoload.php file
Our project structure should look simular to the following:
src
Acme
Foo.php
vendor
monolog
...
composer.json
Including
Now to test.
Include autoload.php
require_once 'path/to/project/vendor/autoload.php';
Assuming Foo.php looks like the following:
<?php
namespace Acme;
class Foo {
public static function bar(){
return 'baz';
}
}
?>
we can then call this from our script:
echo Acme\Foo::bar(); // baz
Please correct any misleading information I may have stated. This is what seems the be the solution to a popular question.