Use bower or Composer to Manage Project Dependencies

[DawoudIO]

We need a good dependencies manager... we can use Composer or Bower... not sure which is the better one.

[dferrans]

I have used composer for a long time, and it seems to handle package dependency very easy.
most PACKAGES are PSR compliant http://www.php-fig.org/ (https://packagist.org/ php packages).
Also, it handle cutting edge PHP features (to handle dependencies, closures, namespacing ). avoiding class conflicts.

to INSTALL packages, you DO NOT need NODEJS (Bower does).

Benefits:
using composer help us to make sure that dependencies of the proyect are meet very easy.
Upgrades made easy with composer commands
Ability to vesion composer with different dependencies across branches.

Downsize:
you need to know how composer works.
Sometimes you need to be able to run CLI commands

Conclusion:

I would prefer COMPOSER instead of BOWER.

[DawoudIO]

I would agree with you that composer is a better for php projects... Let me create a list of libs that we use and go from there

[dferrans]

Eloquent (LARAVEL ORM).
For ORM I would recomend the following package
Is realy easy to use: (see docs)
http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/eloquent
composer file:

{
    "require": {
        "illuminate/database": "*"
    }
}

GUZZLE HTTP:
PHP HTTP client and framework for consuming RESTful web services
urL: http://guzzle.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Composer file:

{
   "require": {
      "guzzlehttp/guzzle": "~5.0"
   }
}

SLIM PHP framework
Url: http://www.slimframework.com/
LIGHT WEIGHT MICRO PHP FRAMEWORK can help us to migrate to MVC .
Composer file:

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

Phinx
This is a DATABASE migration tool writen in php
Is framework agnostic.
Is is realy easy to manage migrations:
URL: http://docs.phinx.org/en/latest/

Composer File:

{
    "require": {
       "robmorgan/phinx": "dev-master"
    }
}

Faker
Faker is a PHP library that generates fake data for you.

https://packagist.org/packages/fzaninotto/faker

{
    "require": {
      "fzaninotto/faker": "1.5.*@dev"
    }
}

[DawoudIO]

While we are not yet using composer, we are moving all the external lib into a vendor dir.