# Composer Package Development tricks and tips

Composer

If you are not a PHP Developer and do not care what composer is then you can skip this article and read some other interesting article on Medium.

If you are a PHP developer and do active PHP Development then there are a lot of chances that you would want to develop a Package and use it in your application.

This is a very short article (rather a tip) which will help you with package development.

If you have your package ready, with PSR-4 Autoloading and you do not want to publish it on [Packagist](https://packagist.org/) or simply want to test it on your development environment then simply you can use **composer repositories** option.

Just add following code in your composer.json file where you want to use the package.

Load Package from Git Repository

It will auto-pull the Package from Github (or any other VCS) and set-it up for you to start with your development (provided you have repository access).

I was following the same and it worked flawlessly multiple developers were working on the Package and it worked like magic but then there was another catch, I wanted to avoid pushing on git and wanted to test the package in an application. composer to the rescue, composer allows local path in repository like this:

Load Package from Local Directory

It worked but the problem was before pushing the code, I had to make changes from VCS to Path in the calling application’s composer file. which was a pain, I tried searching options for commenting in composer.json file or some other options where I can keep the local and production environment together. The internet spoke the truth, No, there is no way to comment in composer.json file. but I found a work-around on [stackoverflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34807269/different-composer-json-files-for-production-and-staging-development).

Apparently, you can have multiple composer.json files in your PHP application and you can mention it run-time, which one to use for installing packages.

you can do:

> composer install // or composer update

which will install the packages from composer.json file and you can do

> COMPOSER=composer-local.json composer install // or composer update

which will load the packages from composer-local.json file.

Hope these tricks will be useful for you.

Thank you for reading.

Happy coding!!!