Question

I have just started to explore zf2 and trying to install modules. have downloaded zip for ZfcAdmin and ZfcUser and added them manually but no luck. I think it can be installed by using composer.phar but how I have skeleton application running perfectly.

I know php composer.phar self-update / install but how to write composer.json is my question

Answer 1

You open the composer.json file with a text-editor of your choice. Then you’ll be able to see the json formatted data, that will be passed to composer.phar

If you wish to add new modules, you’ll see the require: {} block, to which you simply add the namespaces/modules you wish to include. For example extend your composer.json to something like this:

"minimum-stability": "alpha",
"require": {
    "php": ">=5.3.3",
    "zendframework/zendframework": "2.*",
    "zendframework/zend-developer-tools": "dev-master",
    "doctrine/doctrine-orm-module": "0.*"
}

Seeing this i install both zend-developer-tools and zendframework from the zendframework Git-Repositories and additionally i install doctrine-orm-module from doctrine-repository.

A little catch: Some repositories / modules are under heavy development and there will be no stable version yet. Personally i run with the additional parameter "minimum-stability": "alpha", to tell composer to include all alpha repositories for downloading.

If you just need a single alpha-version, you’d much likely need to re-write the composer.json a couple of times.

Last but not least, php composer.phar update will do the trick and you’ll always be up to date with the repositories.

Some additional notes for windows users

• Sometimes Write-Permissions may be missing from command line. You can change this by running the command line with administrator privileges.
• If the PHP Command is not found, you may need to add the PATH to the PHP-Executable into your Environment-Variable PATH
• I wrote a detailed blog-post on how to keep ZF2 running via command line with git for windows 7 myself, so far this has covered most problems, you may want to check out my Blogpost

Hope this gets you running 😉