How to Use Composer With Codeigniter

Composer: Composer is a application-level dependency manager for the PHP programming language that provides a standard format for managing dependencies of PHP software and required libraries. It was developed by Nils Adermann and Jordi Boggiano, who continue to manage the project.

okay , how to use it with CI, here is the simple one line solution – we need include autoload.php file in CI’s bootstrap file index.php or you can place any were in the app but autoload it.

i assume that you already have installed composer on your machine.If not please visit : https://getcomposer.org/

1. Download and install Codeigniter, Create a composer.json file in your project root and define dependencies.
Ex:

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{     "require": {         "mpdf/mpdf": "dev-master"     } }

2. Now run composer , it will download all the dependencies in vendors directory in your project root.To Install Dependecies, open terminal(command prompt) then go to your project root.(Ex: cd c:\xampp\htdocs\).
now run this.

php composer.phar install
If you did a global install and do not have the phar in that directory run this instead:
php composer install

Then you should notice composer creating a ./vendors folder in your application root.

3.Add autoload.php to your Codeigniter’s index.php before require_once BASEPATH.’core/CodeIgniter.php’;

1	include_once './vendor/autoload.php';

Thats’s it.

How to use loaded Class or libraries

Here is my example- welcome controller, index method i am using mpdf with is installed by Composer.

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<?php <?php class Welcome extends CI_Controller {          public function index() {         $pdf= new mPDF();                // data to views         $data = array();         //load the view and saved it into $html variable         $html = $this->load->view('pdf_output',$data,true);         //this the the PDF filename that user will get to download         $pdfFilePath = "output_pdf_name.pdf";                  //generate the PDF from the given html         $pdf->WriteHTML($html);                  //download it.         $pdf->Output($pdfFilePath,"D");     }      }

That’s it.

we can even make it elegant because the above method may be not very convenient to switch to other components in future,unit testing also very difficult ..etc . It would be better if some class with its interface to be placed between the component and your application.so make a CodeIgniter library that extends the installed component.

create a file within application/libraries/ and name it Pdf.php with the following content:

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<?php defined('BASEPATH') OR exit('No direct script access allowed.'); class Pdf extends \mPDF {     public function __construct($params = array()) {          $params = $params['params'] ? $params['params'] : '"en-GB-x","A4","","",10,10,10,10,6,3';          parent::__construct($param);              } }

How to use it

Here is the simple example.

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<?php class Welcome extends CI_Controller {          public function index() {                  // data to views         $data = array();         //load the view and saved it into $html variable         $html=$this->load->view('pdf_output', $data, true);                  //this the the PDF filename that user will get to download         $pdfFilePath = "output_pdf_name.pdf";                  //load mPDF library         $this->load->library('pdf');                  // use this if you want to customize pdf         //$this->load->library('pdf',array('params' => ''));                  //generate the PDF from the given html         $this->pdf->WriteHTML($html);                  //download it.         $this->pdf->Output($pdfFilePath, "D");     }      }

I hope you like this tutorial an please don’t forget to comment below your views and suggestion for improvement.