How to Install Composer on Ubuntu

Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP applications. It allows you to easily manage and install the libraries and packages that your PHP project depends on.

With Composer, you can specify the required libraries and their versions in a configuration file (composer.json) and Composer will handle the process of downloading and installing those dependencies for you.

Composer uses the concept of a dependency tree to resolve and manage dependencies. It analyzes the requirements specified in your composer.json file and retrieves the necessary libraries from the official PHP package repository (Packagist) or other repositories you specify.

Composer also handles autoloading, making it easy to include the necessary classes and files from the installed packages in your PHP code.

In this tutorial, we will give you a quick method of installing and setting up Composer on Ubuntu.

Installing Composer Ubuntu

Update the package manager’s cache by running the following command:

sudo apt update

Install PHP

Before installing composer, it is good to ensure you have PHP installed on your machine, you can do this in a simple command as:

sudo apt-get install php8.1 php8.1-cli

This should download PHP interpreter on your system and all the required dependencies.

Installing Composer

Once PHP is setup, you can proceed to install Composer. You can do this by running the commands provided below:

Download composer setup file:

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"

Verify downloaded file:

php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === 'e21205b207c3ff031906575712edab6f13eb0b361f2085f1f1237b7126d785e826a450292b6cfd1d64d92e6563bbde02') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"

Output:

Installer Verified

Setup composer:

php composer-setup.php

Output:

All settings correct for using Composer
Downloading...

Composer (version 2.5.8) successfully installed to: /home/geekbits/composer.phar
Use it: php composer.phar

Unlink composer file:

php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

You can then use it with the command:

php composer.phar

Conclusion

And there you have it. Successfully installed composer on your Ubuntu system.