Step 7 – Using CodeIgniter and Composer – with a real world example

Lately, everyone wants some good (if not great) piece of code from – let’s say – Packagist.org. And there are people who don’t know how to do that. So let’s try an example to see how this works with CodeIgniter 3.

First of all, let’s analyse the problem. Composer is a great tool for importing great pieces of code. Most of them can be found on packagist.org. Now, where do we want to install these pieces of code. Many would say that, being unrelated to our application, it is a good idea to keep those packages outside of application directory. But I think differently. If an application uses a package, then that package is a part of the application. I mean: what would a welder be without a welding machine? or a footballer without a ball? So I decided to put all the packages inside the application directory.

To do this, we will have to create a composer.json file inside the application directory:

{
  "description" : "My great CodeIgniter application",
  "name" : "Avenirer/myApp",
  "require": {
    "php": ">=5.3"
  }
}

Of course, you can change the description and name… or you can simply delete them. Why PHP version greater or equal to 5.3? Because we want to use namespaces, no?

I sure hope you have composer installed on your computer…

If you have composer installed on your computer you simply open a command prompt and navigate to the location of you application directory (example: cd C:/xampp/htdocs/application ). Once you know you are there, you simply do a composer install . If all went well, after you’ve setup your composer for CodeIgniter, you should see a vendor directory inside the application directory. If not, I am waiting for comments after the tutorial.

Now all we have to do is to make sure we are using the CodeIgniter’s autoloader.

A lot of people prefer different places for this, like the main index.php (the index.php that takes care of starting up the CI), autoloader.php, hooks.php, etc. I prefer to do this in the config.php, specifically just after the composer_autoload configuration element ($config[‘composer_autoload’] = TRUE; ). So after that line, we require_once the Composer autoloader:

require_once APPPATH.'vendor/autoload.php';

Perfect. You now have CodeIgniter with Composer.

Usage example for CodeIgniter with Composer – Simple Excel PHP

Where do we go from here? Let’s try a package from packagist.org. Someone asked on the CodeIgniter Forum, how to use Simple Excel PHP. So why not try this one? https://packagist.org/packages/faisalman/simple-excel-php

First of all we need to install the package. To do this we copy/paste the require: “faisalman/simple-excel-php”: “dev-master” into our composer.json:

{
  "description" : "My great CodeIgniter application",
  "name" : "Avenirer/CodeIgniterTutorial",
  "license": "MIT",
  "require": {
    "php": ">=5.3",
    "faisalman/simple-excel-php": "dev-master"
  }
}

After we save the composer.json file, we go again into our application directory from the command prompt and write:

composer update

Once we’ve done that we should have a faisalman directory inside our application/vendor directory:

-application
- -vendor
- - -faisalman

Now let’s test it.

For testing reasons let’s just make a test_composer() method inside our Welcome class/controller (Welcome.php):

<?php defined('BASEPATH') OR exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Welcome extends CI_Controller {

  public function test_composer()
  {
  }
}

As you may have seen, Simple Excel PHP uses namespacing. If we use namespaces we have to declare this. I will use a piece of code that can be found in the documentation of the package:

<?php defined('BASEPATH') OR exit('No direct script access allowed');

use SimpleExcel\SimpleExcel;

class Welcome extends CI_Controller {
  public function test_composer()
  {
    $excel = new SimpleExcel('xml'); // instantiate new object (will automatically construct the parser & writer type as XML)

    $excel->writer->setData(
      array
      (
        array('ID', 'Name', 'Kode' ),
        array('1', 'Kab. Bogor', '1' ),
        array('2', 'Kab. Cianjur', '1' ),
        array('3', 'Kab. Sukabumi', '1' ),
        array('4', 'Kab. Tasikmalaya', '2' )
      )
    ); // add some data to the writer
    $excel->writer->saveFile('example'); // save the file with specified name (example.xml)
    // and specified target (default to browser)
  }
}

 

Of course, we can skip the namespace declaration, but telling you about namespaces is not the scope of this tutorial:

<?php defined('BASEPATH') OR exit('No direct script access allowed');

use SimpleExcel\SimpleExcel;

class Welcome extends CI_Controller {
  public function test_composer()
  {
    $excel = new \SimpleExcel\SimpleExcel('xml'); // instantiate new object (will automatically construct the parser & writer type as XML)

    $excel->writer->setData(
      array
      (
        array('ID', 'Name', 'Kode' ),
        array('1', 'Kab. Bogor', '1' ),
        array('2', 'Kab. Cianjur', '1' ),
        array('3', 'Kab. Sukabumi', '1' ),
        array('4', 'Kab. Tasikmalaya', '2' )
      )
    ); // add some data to the writer
    $excel->writer->saveFile('example'); // save the file with specified name (example.xml)
    // and specified target (default to browser)
  }
}

Now if we go to http://localhost/welcome/test_composer we should get a download file (example.xml). It is not the scope of this tutorial to teach how to use the package so I won’t go deeper into this matter, but we have the proof of concept for using CodeIgniter with Composer.