When using Composer in a production environment, you need to pay attention to safety, stability and performance. 1. Use composer install --no-dev to reduce unnecessary development dependencies and reduce online environment risks; 2. Always submit and rely on composer.lock files to ensure version consistency and avoid using updates during deployment; 3. Optional configuration platform-check=false to ignore platform difference warnings, suitable for building packaging scenarios; 4. Enable APCU to accelerate automatic loading to improve performance, especially suitable for high concurrent services, while paying attention to namespace uniqueness to avoid cache conflicts.

There are several key points to be paid attention to when using Composer in a production environment to ensure security, stability, and performance of dependency management. Here are some practical tips to help you reduce potential problems during deployment and maintenance.

Install dependencies using --no-dev

In production environments, development tools or testing frameworks are usually not required.
Running composer install --no-dev can skip the packages listed in require-dev , which can reduce unnecessary file size and avoid bringing debugging libraries to online environments.

• Benefits : Reduce the vendor directory size
• Recommended operation : This parameter is added by default in the CI/CD process.
• Note : Some projects may mistakenly place the packages required at runtime into require-dev. Please confirm clearly before deployment.

Fixed dependency version (using composer.lock )

Ensuring that each deployment is based on the same dependency version is an important means of ensuring environmental consistency.
You should always submit the composer.lock file to version control and execute composer install instead of update when deploying.

• composer.lock records the exact version number
• install will be installed strictly according to the lock file
• update will update the package version, which is suitable for use in the local development stage, and is not suitable for production.

If you are worried about security vulnerabilities in your dependencies, you can scan regularly with tools such as Symfony Security Checker or RIPS .

Disable platform requirements check (optional)

If your production server is configured differently from the development environment system (such as PHP version), Composer will prompt a warning or even interrupt the installation by default.
You can bypass these checks by setting platform-check=false :

 {
  "config": {
    "platform-check": false
  }
}

• Suitable for scenarios that are packaged after CI/CD build
• Not recommended for running install/update directly on a production server

Enable APCU Accelerated Automatic Loading (Enhance Performance)

If you are using PHP-FPM and have APCU extension enabled, you can significantly improve the performance of Composer autoloading by enabling APCU Class Loader.

run:

 composer dump-autoload --optimize --apcu

• Reduce file IO operations
• There are significant benefits to high-concurrency services
• Pay attention to the cache key conflict problem of APCU (try to be unique in namespace)

Basically these common but easily overlooked points. Proper configuration of Composer not only makes deployment smoother, but also saves a lot of trouble for later maintenance.

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