How to use PHP Composer autoloading feature?

2 years ago
Benjamin Taylor
2 minutes

To automatically load with Composer, the following steps are required:

  1. Make sure Composer is installed by running the command composer –version.
  2. Create a composer.json file in the root directory of the project, where you can define the project’s dependencies and autoload rules. For example, here is a simple example of a composer.json file:
{
    "name": "your-project-name",
    "require": {
        "vendor/package": "1.0.0"
    },
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "YourNamespace\\": "src/"
        }
    }
}

In the example above, vendor/package is the name and version of the package you depend on. YourNamespace is the namespace of your project, src/ is the directory of your project source code.

  1. Use the command “composer install” to install dependencies and generate an autoload file. Composer will automatically download and install the dependencies defined in the composer.json file, and generate an autoload file named autoload.php.
  2. Include the autoload.php file in your project. You can add the following code to the entry file of your project.
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

This will load the autoload file generated by Composer, allowing you to use the packages it depends on and custom classes.

  1. Now you can take advantage of the autoload feature. When you use a class in your code that has not been included yet, Composer will automatically load the necessary class files according to the autoload rules.
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