Adding dependencies from a single file, without composer.json

Question

I am struggling around a wrong usage of composer, for sure.

I set up this repository: https://github.com/alle/assets-merger

I forked the project and was just trying to make it a kohana-module, including all the dependencies.

As for it would need the YUI comporess JAR, I was trying to make just that JARfile as a dependency, and I ended to declare it in the composer.json file (please, look at this).

Once I need to add my new package to a project I add it in the require section as follows:

...
"alle/assets-merger": "dev-master",
...

But the (latest) composer update command says:

Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.

Problem 1
- Installation request for alle/assets-merger dev-develop -> satisfiable by alle/assets-merger[dev-develop].
- alle/assets-merger dev-develop requires yui/yuicompressor 2.4.8 -> no matching package found.

Potential causes:
- A typo in the package name
- The package is not available in a stable-enough version according to your minimum-stability setting see <https://groups.google.com/d/topic/composer-dev/_g3ASeIFlrc/discussion> for more details.

And my story ends here.

How should I configure my composer.json in the https://github.com/alle/assets-merger repository, in order to include it as a fully satisfied kohana-module in other projects?

Answer 1

Some things I notice in your composer.json.

1. There is a version of that CSS minify available on Packagist which says it is just a copy of the original Goole-Code hosted files, but with Composer: natxet/cssmin. It is version 3.0.2, but I think that shouldn't make a difference.

2. mrclay/minify is included twice in the packages with the same version. It also is available on Packagist. You will probably already use that (version 2.2.0 is registered, and because you didn't turn of Packagist access, it will be generally available for install unless a version requirement or conflict prevents it).

3. You are trying to download a JAR file (which is a java executable without and PHP), but try to get PHP classmaps out of it. That will fail for sure.

4. You did miss the big note in the Composer documentation saying that Composer cannot resolve repositories mentioned in sub packages, only in the root package. That means that whatever you mention in your alle/asset-merger package will not be used if you use that package anywhere else. You'd have to duplicate these repositories in every package in addition to adding the package name itself as "required".

What this means is that you probably avoided missing mrclay/minify because it is available on Packagist, you might as well have added the cssmin by accident, but you definitly did not add YUICompressor.

But you shouldn't add this in the first place, because it is no PHP software. You can however add post-install commands to your projects. All your Composer integration does is download the JAR file. You can do that with a post-install or post-update command. See the documentation here.