Autoloading

Autoloading

After the introduction of Composer the configuration of PSR-4 style autoloading is quite simple. Here are some links to provide background:

• PHP Autoloading Classes
• PSR-4 Autoloading Standard
• How to create a PSR-4 PHP package

What is autoloading?

Autoloading helps to avoid management of require statements to load depending classes. It can be configured by adding Namespace -> Path mapping to the file composer.json.

How to use autoloading?

Each call of composer install/update creates or updates the autoloading configuration.

Content of composer.json:

{
    ...

    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {"Fossology\\Lib\\": "lib/php"}
    }
}

If you have a class on the path lib/php/Foo/Bar.php

<?php

namespace Fossology\Lib\Foo;

class Bar
{
}

you can now instatiate an object of type Bar everywhere just by using

$bar = new \Fossology\Lib\Foo\Bar();

The autoloader takes care of reading the file Bar.php once to ensure a defined class Bar.

How to enable autoloading?

Just include the autoloader initialization file

src/vendor/autoload.php

Currently this is done in src/lib/php/common.php.