Composer Autoloading Tutorial

We’ve been taking a closer look at using Composer to manage dependencies in our PHP projects. Getting up to speed with composer takes some practice and diligence just like any other part of programming. There is a bit of a learning curve, and while you can do all the things Composer offers manually, if you take the time to learn the tool, your workflow will be more streamlined and efficient. It’s a lot like Laravel actually. Laravel teaches you to use better coding practices, and if you are new to them, your programming speed will probably actually decline at first. Much like using Composer however, if you put in the time up front to learn more efficient ways of doing things, it will benefit you greatly in the longer run. In this episode we’ll take a closer look at Autoloading using Composer.

Four Ways to Autoload

With composer, you specify in your composer.json file how and what you will autoload for a given project. There is an autoload object within the composer.json which you can populate with one or more of these four techniques to make use of autoloading. You have the option of File Based Autoloading, Classmap Based Autoloading, PSR-0 Autoloading, and PSR-4 Autoloading. These would be referenced by the keys files classmap psr-0 and psr-4. At the time of this writing, the official documentation for Composer is recommending PSR-4, but we’ll take a look at all four options.

1. File Based Autoloading

First up we’ll do a simple example of File Based Autoloading using Composer.

In our web root, create a folder named aldemo, for auto load demo.
Now we can add a folder to hold our custom code. We can call it mylibrary
Add a functions.php file in there, and define a custom function for yourself. We’ll use this one, but you can create your own if you like.

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<?php

function lego () {
return 'You are now a master builder.';
}
Now we can use Composer to generate the autoload files for us. Create a composer.json file and place it in the aldemo folder like so:

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{
    "autoload": {
        "files": ["mylibrary/functions.php"]
    }
}
Run composer dump in the aldemo folder. It will note that it is Generating autoload files for you.
Create an index.php file in the aldemo folder and make a call to your new function. We simply did this:

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<?php

echo lego();
Now load up your page in the browser http://localhost/aldemo/ and see the result. Ouch. That didn’t work out so well: Fatal error: Call to undefined function lego() in C:wampwwwaldemoindex.php on line 3
We still need to include the autoloader like so! require 'vendor/autoload.php';. Your index.php will now look like:

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<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

echo lego();
Once again go ahead and visit http://localhost/aldemo/ and observe that yes, You are now a master builder.

2. Classmap Based Autoloading

Now we can take a look at how to do Classmap Based Autoloading. This one is better than files since you don’t have to specify the actual file itself, just the directory it lives in. We used this approach in our Custom Helper Functions in Laravel Episode.

Create a folder called classmap in the aldemo folder.
Add a functions.php file that contains some simple logic, we’ll use this:

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<?php
Class Cmautoload {

  public function classmap () {
  return 'that knows how to autoload with a classmap! ';
  }
}

Note that you need to use a Class! The classmap loads only Classes, whereas with files, you can load native functions.
Update your index.php to include a call to the new function:

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<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

echo lego();

$cm = new Cmautoload;
echo $cm->classmap();

Update your composer.json like so:

{

"autoload": {

"files": ["mylibrary/functions.php"],

"classmap": [

"classmap"

]

}

The naming might not have been the best for this example, but it will do. You’ll see the new classmap object within the autoload object, and it now has an array with one value, classmap. That says, “We are using a classmap, and I want you to look in the classmap folder to autoload any classes you find.”

Run composer dump in the aldemo folder
Load http://localhost/aldemo/ and you’ll see that You are now a master builder, that knows how to autoload with a classmap!

3. PSR-0 Based Autoloading

At this point we’ll get just slightly more advanced and make use of PSR-0 autoloading. I’m not one for crazy verbiage so if you want every single detail, read the spec. For me, PSR-0 just means we’re using namespaces in this convention <Vendor Name>(<Namespace>)*<Class Name>. The main point is the namespaces need to follow the folder structure.

Ok we know that aldemo is our root folder, so lets add the following folders into this directory /src/vegibit/library.

Now, we can create a greeting.php class file in the /src/vegibit/library folder. It will hold two namesspaces like so:

<?php

namespace VegibitLibrary;

Class Greeting

{

public function hi()

{

return "We got you covered";

}

namespace VegithemesLibrary;

Class Greeting

{

public function hi()

{

return " with Free Twitter Bootstrap Themes!";

}

Now hold on just a minute! You have two different namespaces in the same greeting.php class file. Not only that, each namespace has the exact same class name and method name! Normally PHP would unleash a rath of fury and anger upon you if you tried to do this without namespaces! This is the benefit of namespaces however, you can have classes and methods that use the same name, as long as they are in their own namespace. Excellent!

Let’s update our composer.json so that it has the needed info to load these classes using PSR-0

{

"autoload": {

"files": ["mylibrary/functions.php"],

"classmap": [

"classmap"

"psr-0": {

"Vegibit\Library": "src",

"Vegithemes\Library": "src"

}

Now check it out. What this configuration says is, “The VegibitLibrary and VegithemesLibrary namespaces both live in the src directory.

Run composer dump to update our autoload files.

Now that all of our plumbing is in place, we can use our new code in the index.php file. Let’s update it like so:

<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

echo lego();

$cm = new Cmautoload;

echo $cm->classmap();

$vb = new VegibitLibraryGreeting;

$vt = new VegithemesLibraryGreeting;

echo $vb->hi();

echo $vt->hi();

Finally, we can visit http://localhost/aldemo/ and find that You are now a master builder, that knows how to autoload with a classmap! We got you covered with Free Twitter Bootstrap Themes! Awesome!

4. PSR-4 Based Autoloading

PSR-0 has been the cutting edge method of using autoloading in PHP… until now. The new kid on the block is PSR-4 autoloading. At the time of this writing, PSR-4 is the recommended method of autoloading according to the official Composer Documentation. So what’s the big deal with this PSR-4 business? Let’s examine.

With PSR-0, we needed to map our namespaces exactly to our directory structure. This turns out to create a lot of empty folders in the file system, which might not be the best way to do things. In some respects, I think it actually helps to keep the consistency. On the other hand, why create such a verbose directory structure if you don’t have to? Well, in PSR-0, you have to. In PSR-4 however, you can shorten your directory structure while still using the same lengthy namespacing.

Let’s remove our greeting.php class file from aldemo/src/vegibit/library and place it in the aldemo/src directory.
Delete the vegibit/library directories. We are now left with aldemo/src/greeting.php.
Now, at this point, we have the same greeting.php class file, and it uses the same namespacing within the file, and our code in the index.php file is trying to use these classes in the same way. The only difference is that we moved the physical location of the file from aldemo/src/vegibit/library to aldemo/src. In our composer.json, we already said that our Vegibit/Library and Vegithemes/Library namespaces live in the src directory, so in theory this should all still work right? Let’s try:
Load up http://localhost/aldemo/ and whoops, Fatal error: Class ‘VegibitLibraryGreeting’ not found in C:wampwwwaldemoindex.php on line 10. Ok, it’s not working. Well, what we just did was basically break the rules of PSR-0, which is that the directory structure must follow the namespaces.

Let’s make just a small tweak to our composer.json file. It now looks like this:

{

"autoload": {

"files": ["mylibrary/functions.php"],

"classmap": [

"classmap"

"psr-4": {

"Vegibit\Library\": "src",

"Vegithemes\Library\": "src"

}

We changed psr-0 to psr-4, and added \ to the end of our namespaces which is a requirement of psr-4.

Run composer dump
Visit http://localhost/aldemo/ one more time and find that, yes, You are now a master builder, that knows how to autoload with a classmap! We got you covered with Free Twitter Bootstrap Themes! It works!

So you see, using PSR-0, developers were forced to use lengthy directory structures which created a lot of empty directories. This was only needed to make the autoloader work. With PSR-4, we no longer have to use such verbose directory paths.

Composer Autoloading Conclusion

We covered a lot of ground here! We had a good look at the four methods of using autoloading in Composer. We can use files, classmaps, psr-0, and psr-4. It is most definitely worth the time to learn Composer and make use of all the benefits it can provide you with!

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