Chapter 14. Working with Packages

Modern PHP applications tend to be comprised of a large number of files. Take the Magento 2 eCommerce platform as an example. Once installed, its vendor directory contains over thirty thousand of the PHP class files. The sheer size of it is enough to stunt anyone. Why so many files, one might wonder? Nowadays, it is popular, if not mandatory, to make use of preexisting libraries and packages other developers have written before us. It would not make much sense to reinvent the wheel all the time. This is why package managers such as Composer are ever so popular among the PHP developers. Making use of these package managers usually means pulling in a diverse set of third-party packages into our project. While this usually hints increased application size, it also allows us to jump-start our application development. The added benefit being the quality and continuous maintenance of these packages by third parties, which we then merely update into our application...