ignore dev dependencies in php composer

Question

I have developed a composer laravel based project that I need to install on a remote production server. The problem is I have limited permission/ access so my option is to "archive" the package( using composer archive) and unpack on the production.

What folders do I need to archive and how can I ignore the dev dependencies of the package as well as vendor dev dependencies?

Answer 1

composer archive is likely not to help you, because this command creates an archive of a defined version of a package.

You probably want to upload the whole working application, and not only one package. You should create a little script that will create the archive file for you, which should do:

• checkout the application from the repository in a new directory
• run composer install --no-dev to install all required dependencies without dev-dependencies
• optionally delete files that are not necessary on the server, like documentation, the .git folder, and other stuff
• create the archive file from all these files
• optionally upload that archive to the target server and unarchive there
• optionally check basic functions and switch to the new uploaded version on the server

Answer 2

Here is a pkg bash script I created to bundle with composer archive, but without the development dependencies. It restores the env back to the original state (assuming you want dev dependencies installed).

I still haven't found another way, even though this is years old. This worked reasonably well for packaging a private wordpress plugin.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -uo pipefail

rm -f *.zip || true
composer update --no-dev
composer archive --format=zip
composer update

Also worth noting, you can include/exclude files during the archive command via a block in the composer.json:

    "archive": {
        "exclude": [
            ".*",
            "pkg",
            "README.md",
            "bin/",
            "composer.*",
            "phpunit.*",
            "/resources",
            "tests/",
        ]
    }