Composer is a hugely flexible tool that works reliably on all but the most obscure hosters/platforms. What's more, it provides a plugin system that lets you pull external code from a repository and have that code hook into the normal Composer execution flow. The logical conclusion is that Composer is used for much more than just pulling in dependencies.

We'll start this session with a quick look at the basic mechanisms that make Composer as flexible as it is. Then, we'll go through some of the more useful and/or exotic examples of how to use Composer for solving problems that it wasn't really meant to solve.