Configuring the Composer Manager module (D7) on Acquia Hosting

    See more
    • Updated

    The Composer Manager module is a useful module for those interested in taking advantage of Composer and PSR-connected design patterns in Drupal 7. Using such methods generally result in stable, better-vetted solutions using modern PHP development practices.

    The module is a dependency of several contributed modules on Drupal.org, including the Amazon S3 module, a module that Acquia recommends when clients express a need for either large numbers of files, or large file storage: https://docs.acquia.com/cloud/files/terabytes

    Configuring Composer Manager for Acquia Hosting

    Configuring this module for Acquia Hosting is simple, as long as you follow a simple pattern:

    • Adding $conf variables to settings.php that tell Composer Module where to begin its identification patterns, so it can find it's dependencies
    • Always conduct your builds locally - this is considered an essential best practice.  Composer Manager requires write access to directories - in particular, the composer.json file - and due to the secure nature of our hosting environment, we do not allow write access to files outside /tmp or the files directory (in most cases, the distributed file system). This is mitigated by testing and committing your code locally (preferred) or in LiveDev mode on a non-Production environment. Composer Manager will not attempt to rebuild composer.json or vendor packages otherwise
    • Be aware of a critical bug fix: the bug was addressed in the latest Dev release of the module (as of 16 Sept 2016): https://www.drupal.org/project/composer_manager/releases/7.x-1.x-dev

    General changes to settings.php:

    In general, you should be able to copy and paste this code directly into your site's settings.php file, beneath the Acquia require line:

    $conf['composer_manager_vendor_dir'] = '../vendor'; 
$conf['composer_manager_file_dir'] = '../'; 
if (isset($_ENV['AH_SITE_GROUP']) && isset($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']) && strpos($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'], 'livedev') === FALSE) { 
  $conf['composer_manager_autobuild_file'] = 0; 
  $conf['composer_manager_autobuild_packages'] = 0; 
}

    These changes will:

    • set the vendor directory to ../vendor/
    • set the composer.json path to ../composer.json

    More Information

    Related articles