August 23rd, 2011

Unsatisfied with the status quo of PHP package managers, we set out to research tools used in other environments like Node.js' npm and Ruby's Bundler. Based on our findings, we created Composer, a PHP package manager that fulfills our requirements. For dependency resolution, in particular, we settled on writing a SAT solver inspired by the one used in zypper, SUSE's RPM installer. This talk discusses the theoretical concepts behind Composer and shows you how to manage your next PHP project's dependencies with it.

Nils Adermann is a passionate free software developer who has been contributing to phpBB for the past 6 years. He has taken over the lead developer position in 2010 to modernize the forum software and turn it into a Symfony2 application. He studies computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and worked on AI research for humanoid robotics.