Global specification for Composer

spec.md

What

This is a proposed feature for Composer in which you would be able to add a --global option to manipulate installed packages at a system-wide / user-wide level.

This should not be used for autoloading, but rather just for running any binaries.

Why

Some projects provide utilities to be run via the command line. Like other package managers, these packages should be able to be installed at a global level so the commands can be run as long as you have the bin directory in your PATH.

Folder

Since Composer already uses ~/.composer for caching, this should be the default folder for --global. There needs to be a way to specify an alternative location i.e. /usr/local/lib/composer

How

The desired folder would contain a composer.json that would look like:

{
    "config": {
        "vendor-dir": "vendor",
        "bin-dir": "bin"
    }
}

• Using composer (add|install) package/composer (remove|uninstall) package would modify the require hash of this file and then perform the appropriate action.
• Users could optionally specify a version when installing: --version option or @version suffix
• Packages would be installed under the global vendor directory.