Composer not autoloading your package?

I needed to link a GitHub hosted library into my project with composer. It was my own fork of a library that was abandoned. I didn’t want to register it with packagist.com because it already is infested with weeds of this kind. Conveniently, the library already had composer.json so I just needed to edit my project’s composer.json and link to the library. Easy I thought.

  1. {
  2. …
  3.   "repositories": [
  4.     {
  5.       "type": "package",
  6.       "package": {
  7.         "name": "xpavp03/nette-csv-response",
  8.         "version": "dev-patch-1",
  9.         "source": {
  10.           "type": "git",
  11.           "url": "https://github.com/xpavp03/nette-csv-response.git",
  12.           "reference": "origin/patch-1"
  13.         }
  14.       }
  15.     }
  16.   ],
  17.   "require": {
  18.  …
  19.   "xpavp03/nette-csv-response": "dev-patch-1"
  20.   }
  21. …
  22. }
  23.  

Well, it did download the files but it also created a Git repository in my vendors structure. I could work around it by excluding it during deployment but I wanted to see if I can fetch the library without it.

  1.  "repositories": [
  2.     {
  3.       "type": "package",
  4.       "package": {
  5.         "name": "xpavp03/nette-csv-response",
  6.         "version": "dev-patch-1",
  7.         "dist": {
  8.           "type": "zip",
  9.           "url": "https://github.com/xpavp03/nette-csv-response/archive/patch-1.zip"
  10.         }
  11.       }
  12.     }
  13.   ],
  14.  

Worked great but, composer didn’t include this library in its autoloading files. Mhm…

It turned out that if you link a library as a package composer won’t look for its composer.json. It didn’t matter that it existed and had instructions for autoloading – composer didn’t expect it there and didn’t try looking. So the solution was to include autoloading instructions into my project’s composer.json:

  1.  "repositories": [
  2.     {
  3.       "type": "package",
  4.       "package": {
  5.         "name": "xpavp03/nette-csv-response",
  6.         "version": "dev-patch-1",
  7.         "dist": {
  8.           "type": "zip",
  9.           "url": "https://github.com/xpavp03/nette-csv-response/archive/patch-1.zip"
  10.         }
  11.         "autoload": {
  12.           "classmap": ["src/"]
  13.         }
  14.       }
  15.     }
  16.   ],
  17.  

I wish this was mentioned in the documentation.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2016 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Composer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Composer not autoloading your package?”

  1. SW says:
    January 30, 2019 at 2:10 am

    Thank you for this. I was searching for a while to figure out why my package wasn’t registering in the autoloader. Setting the autoload in the respository did it. Strange that it doesn’t just read the package’s composer.json.

    Reply

Leave a Reply for SW