Safely edit a third party composer (vendor) package in Laravel & prevent losing customized changes on release of a new version of the package

Question

I want to edit a package I pulled from composer in my Laravel 5 project, however i believe that if I ran composer update and a new version of this package has been released, I will lose all of my changes. How should I go about editing the package? Is there a way to copy package out of the vendor directory so I can use it somewhere else in my project?

Answer 1

The simple, fast and safe method:

1. Create a directory in the Laravel's root directory and name it packages or whatever you like.
2. Move the modified package from vendor directory to your packages directory.
3. Update composer.json to load the package from your packages directory instead of vendor directory.

first remove it from require

"require": {     "php": ">=5.6.4",     "laravel/framework": "5.3.*",     "laravelcollective/html": "^5.3.0", <==== remove this line                                "barryvdh/laravel-debugbar": "^2.3",     "doctrine/dbal": "^2.5" }, 

and then add it to autoload

"autoload": {     "psr-4": {         "App\\": "app/",         "Collective\\Html\\": "packages/laravelcollective/html/src", <==== add this line     }, } 

Please do not forget to run

composer dumpauto 

Alternative for step 3.

There is also a new alternative if you're using latest version of composer.

Add this to you composer.json

"repositories": [     {         "type": "path",         "url": "./packages/laravelcollective"     } ] 

And then modify the version of package to dev-master

"require": {     "php": ">=5.6.4",     "laravel/framework": "5.3.*",     "laravelcollective/html": "dev-master", <==== this line                                "barryvdh/laravel-debugbar": "^2.3",     "doctrine/dbal": "^2.5" }, 

Finally

composer update 

Answer 2

It actually isn't safe to edit composer packages, for the very reason you point out.

What I do is extends the classes that I want/need to change.

I have done it here with the Filesystem class. It doesn't ensure that it won't break, but it does let you update without overwriting your changes.

config/app.php

<?php  return [      'providers' => [  //        'Illuminate\Filesystem\FilesystemServiceProvider',         'MyApp\Filesystem\FilesystemServiceProvider',     ],      'aliases' => [         ...     ],  ]; 

MyApp\Filesystem\FilesystemServiceProvider.php

<?php namespace MyApp\Filesystem;  use Config; use Storage; use League\Flysystem\Filesystem; use Dropbox\Client as DropboxClient; use League\Flysystem\Dropbox\DropboxAdapter; use Illuminate\Filesystem\FilesystemManager as LaravelFilesystemManager;  class FilesystemManager extends LaravelFilesystemManager{      public function createDropboxDriver(array $config)     {         $client = new DropboxClient($config['token'], $config['app']);          return $this->adapt(             new Filesystem(new DropboxAdapter($client))         );     } }