NPM/Bower Dependency Manager for Composer

The Composer Asset Plugin allows you to manage project assets (css, js, etc.) in your composer.json without installing NPM or Bower.

This plugin works by transposing package information from NPM or Bower to a compatible version for Composer. This allows you to manage asset dependencies in a PHP based project very easily.

Important:

The next major version of Composer Asset Plugin is so different, but also incompatible with the current version, that it became a new project named Foxy.

Foxy is the new way to manage the assets of PHP libraries, because it works nativelly with all the features of NPM or Yarn. However, this plugin will continue to be maintained by the community, without having new features.

You can read the reasons for this new version, or the difference between Foxy and Fxp Composer Asset Plugin, but also how does Foxy work.

Features include:

Works with native management system versions of VCS repository of composer
Works with public and private VCS repositories
Lazy loader of asset package definitions to improve performance
Import filter with the dependencies of the root package and the installed packages, for increased dramatically the performance for the update
Automatically get and create an Asset VCS repository defined in:
- NPM Registry
- Bower Registry
- Private Bower Registry
Automatically get and create the Asset VCS repositories of dependencies defined in each asset package (dev dependencies included)
Mapping conversion of asset package to composer package for:
- NPM Package - package.json
- Bower Package - bower.json
Conversion of Semver version to the composer version
Conversion of Semver range version to the composer range version
Conversion of dependencies with URL to the composer dependencies with the creation of VCS repositories
Conversion of multiple versions of the same dependency to different dependencies of composer
Add manually the multiple versions of a same dependency in the project
Add a custom config of VCS Repository
Override the config of VCS Repository defined by the asset registry directly in config section of root composer
VCS drivers for:
- Git
- GitHub (compatible with repository redirects)
- Git Bitbucket
- Mercurial
- Mercurial Bitbucket
- SVN
- Perforce
Local cache system for:
- package versions
- package contents
- repository redirects
Custom asset installers configurable in the root file composer.json
For Bower, all files defined in the section ignore will not be installed
Disable or replace the deleting of the ignore files for Bower
Enable manually the deleting of the ignore files for NPM
Use the Ignore Files Manager in the Composer scripts
Configure the plugin per project, globally or with the environment variables
Compatible with all commands, including:
- depends
- diagnose
- licenses
- remove
- require
- search (bower only)
- show
- status

Why this plugin?

There already are several possibilities for managing assets in a PHP project:

Install Node.js and use NPM or Bower command line in addition to Composer command line
Do #1, but add Composer scripts to automate the process
Include assets directly in the project (not recommended)
Create a repository with all assets and include the composer.json file (and use Packagist or an VCS Repository)
Add a package repository in composer.json with a direct download link
Create a Satis or Packagist server
Other?

It goes without saying that each javascript, CSS, etc. library should be developed with the usual tools for that language, which front-end developers know well. However, in the case of a complete project in PHP, it shouldn't be necessary to use several tools (PHP, Nodejs, Composer, NPM, Bower, Grunt, etc.) to simply install these assets in your project.

This plugin has been created to address these issues. Additionally, most developers will not add a composer.json file to their projects just to support php based projects, especially when npm and/or bower already exist and are widely used.