Install Composer for deploying a Laravel web application

This article shows how to install Composer, the standard package manager for PHP, and how to install the PHP packages required for serving a Laravel application.

You might also like this guide from Digital Ocean on the same topic.

Possibly create a swap file

Rumor has it you need about 2 GB of RAM to comfortably install Composer packages. If your server has less than 2 GB RAM, consider creating and activating a swap file to make up for the missing RAM (the swap file lets the server use hard disk space to supplement RAM):

# Create a 1 GB swap file (adjust as needed to get about 2 GB total swap + RAM)
laravel@server$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=1024 status=progress
laravel@server$ sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile
laravel@server$ sudo mkswap /swapfile
laravel@server$ sudo swapon /swapfile

If you want to permanently keep the swap file, you need to add an entry in the /etc/fstab file. To do this, open /etc/fstab and at the bottom (carefully!) place the following line:

# Place this line at the bottom of /etc/fstab
/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0

If you won’t need the swap file after installing Composer, you can disable the swap file with swapoff (after installing Composer!), remove any relevant entries from /etc/fstab, and delete the swap file.

Install Composer

First install dependencies for installing Composer (you’ll probably have many of these already installed):

# Dependencies for installing Composer 
# (curl downloads Composer, unzip unpackages it, and php-cli is needed to run it)
laravel@server$ sudo apt install curl unzip php-cli 

We’ll perform the installation with Composer’s official installer. I’m essentially following the official instructions; here is what to do:

# Change into your home directory.
# (Or really just somewhere you can keep track of the downloaded files.)
laravel@server$ cd

# Download the Composer installer and save it to the file `composer-setup.php`
laravel@server$ curl https://getcomposer.org/installer -o composer-setup.php

We’ll then perform a cryptographic verification of the installer’s integrity (to ensure the installer hasn’t been corrupted or tampered with):

# Retrieve the latest Composer installer hash.
# You use this hash to verify the integrity of the Composer installer
laravel@server$ HASH=`curl -sS https://composer.github.io/installer.sig`

# Verify installer's hash before actually installing Composer.
laravel@server$ php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '${HASH}') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"

Assuming the installer was verified, you’re safe to run the installer:

# Assuming the hash is verified, install Composer (in `/usr/local/bin` to avoid
# conflicting with packages managed by your package manager)
laravel@server$ sudo php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

The last step installs Composer at /usr/local/bin/composer. You can safely delete the composer-setup.php script after completing the installation.

Use Composer to install PHP packages

Then change into the directory from which your app is served and use Composer to install your Laravel app’s PHP dependencies.

# Install Composer packages
laravel@server$ cd /srv/www/laravel-project
laravel@server$ composer install --optimize-autoloader --no-dev

This command looks in your Laravel project’s composer.json file and installs the project’s PHP dependencies into a vendor directory in your project’s root. The options are recommended by Laravel; --optimize-autoloader speeds up autoloading and --no-dev ignores development dependencies that won’t be needed in production.

(Note that optimize-autoloader is probably turned on by default in the config section of your composer.json file, but it can’t hurt to specify it explicitly.)

Next: The next article shows how to install your application’s JavaScript dependencies.