Creating and Using a Local Composer Package in PHP

This article provides a step‑by‑step guide to creating a local Composer package for a PHP project, configuring the package and the root project's composer.json, adding the package as a dependency, and verifying the setup with a simple test script.

First, create a working directory for the local package and initialize Composer:

mkdir composerLocal && cd composerLocal

composer init

Next, create a packages folder and inside it generate the package directory hail812/hello:

mkdir packages && cd packages

mkdir -p hail812/hello && cd hail812/hello

composer init # press Enter for all prompts

Ensure that the name field in the package’s composer.json matches the directory name. Then configure the package’s autoload section and add a repository entry in the root project's composer.json so the local package can be discovered.

The resulting directory structure is shown in the following image:

Example contents of the package’s composer.json (image):

Example contents of the root project’s composer.json (image):

Install the local package as a dependency: composer require hail812/hello:dev-master This command creates a vendor directory in the project, containing the package files.

Finally, create an index.php file to test the autoloaded package (screenshot shown below):

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