Most PHP developers by now will know Composer and use it to pull in third-party packages into their projects.

Composer's ubiquity, its capability to run reliably on the most obscure platforms as well as its strategic role within a PHP project let it reach far beyond simple dependency management, though.

In this workshop, we'll go over the mechanisms that make Composer the ideal candidate to manage your project's entire lifecycle and use it to make your development environment self-contained.

We'll examine how to use Composer to:

• quick-start your projects with automatically generated boilerplate code
• pull in your development dependencies without impacting your actual project
• hook all code quality efforts into the project's lifecycle
• set up easy access to testing
• create an automated deployment path

The end result will be a project package with a greatly improved onboarding experience, making it a breeze to get new colleagues (or your future self) quickly up to speed for working on the actual problem.