Why do you need PHP composer?

Question

Frontend

Hello! I have never used frameworks, I write all projects myself (PHP) (of course, with my own experience and with my own structure), so it’s hard for me to imagine why composer is needed in principle.
I understand that it will download some files, plugins, etc. But what's the point if I don't know where he downloaded them and what exactly he downloaded. And why is it so important to use it... After all, with the same success, you can download the archive, without a bunch of extra files with the same plugin and drop it into a folder manually.
In general, this is the whole question: why download a bunch of unnecessary files, not knowing where they are located and where they are downloaded, instead of manually downloading, where I just download a couple of necessary files and connect them to the project.
And in general, do you need a composer for self-written projects?
Please do not kick, there is no one else to ask ...

Answer 1

Develop the ability to search for information. Practice on the toaster and on your own question.

Answer 2

I'll just leave my comment.
How much do you study HTML and CSS? If it's less than half a year, believe me, you don't even know them by 50%.
In my subjective opinion, in order to call yourself such a "loud" word as "Frontend developer" ?, you must have, even if not experience, but the time spent on:
1) HTML + CSS -> preferably from a year old
2) JS -> at least a year
It would also be good to learn how to use many things that for some reason many do not know/forget or something else, meaning beginners ("coders"):
Bundles -> Gulp\Webpack
Preprocessors -> Sass\ Scss etc
Version Control -> Git
Developer tools -> the same devtools in the browser (right click -> see the element code) (they have many different functions, if you look closely)
At least minimal knowledge of backing -> php\node.js etc.)
And only after all this, it will be possible to look in the direction of any frameworks, because without all of the above, even if you know, it may even be good that it is unlikely that any framework, it will not be easy for you to find a job.
PS There are rumors that even on a simple layout (we discard almost everything after point 1), you can earn decent money, because lately I see more and more often something like: "In our studio, the front asks to find a layout designer for him" or something something like that.

Answer 3

Learn more Javascript. And only after complete mastery of the language, take on frameworks. In the basics, it's better to know all the basics - React, Angular, Vue. In detail, the one for which there are more employers.

Answer 4

https://github.com/FrontendMasters/front-end-handb...
https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

Answer 5

The question is old, but many will be in search and will find it relevant.
Composer , like other package managers, is nothing more than a utility imposed by hype and the desire of its maintainers to take control of everything, a utility to which you are tightly attached. An extra dependence on both the utility itself and the "main" repository (online service) packagist imposed on it, which for a second is just a business.
Almost the entire project has already succumbed to this madness, bought into the convenience of one command to do the installation magic.
There are better reasons not to use Composer, but it requires a deep understanding of backwards compatibility, maintenance, and so on.

Answer 6

Oh, how many people I have seen "I have all my own bicycles, dear, why do I need something else."
1. Put some package in one command - the most obvious. Don't bother with archives.
2. Upgrade in one team. Moreover, if something goes wrong, you can quickly roll back.
3. Dependencies of third-party packages. No need to have multiple copies of the same library.
4. Convenient built-in autoloader.
5. Convenience of sweep. The repository stores only your own code, which is quickly deployed to the server, and all the necessary dependencies are already installed there.

Answer 7

Composer is a dependency management tool in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.

https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md
Of course, you can manually download and install/update everything, just one day you will think "damn, what a fool I was..." and start using composer