Composer Dist Plugin

A Composer plugin that allows zip files containing distributable assets to be downloaded and extracted within a package's directory when it's installed.

Useful for packages that need to ship compiled css/js files but don't want to track them within git.

Note: This just downloads and extracts the zip.
It doesn't compile or create them. To do that, check the the Prerequisites section below.

Example

Suppose you publish a PHP package foo/bar which expects your compiled dist assets to be located in resources/dist. Place this configuration in the composer.json for foo/bar:

{
  "name": "foo/bar",
  "require": {
    "pixelfear/composer-dist-plugin": "dev-master"
  },
  "extra": {
    "download-dist": {
      "url": "https://github.com/foo/bar/releases/download/{$version}/dist.tar.gz",
      "path": "resources/dist"
    }
  }
}

Prerequisites

This plugin only downloads and extracts an existing zip from a URL. You will need to create the zip yourself.

A good solution for this could be using a GitHub Actions workflow.

For example, this workflow will do the following steps whenever you push a tag starting with v:

• Checkout your code using Git
• Run npm install
• Compile assets using Laravel Mix
• Create a tar.gz archive
• Create a GitHub release
• Upload the tar to the release

Of course, this means that archives will only exist for tagged releases. If you are installating a package using a branch like dev-master, the zip will 404. In this case you can manually compile your assets locally.

Configuration

Multiple bundles

In the example above, a single zip (bundle) is used. However, you may configure multiple bundles to be downloaded by providing an array of bundle objects.

  "extra": {
    "download-dist": [
      {
        "url": "...",
        "path": "dist/one",
      },
      {
        "url": "...",
        "path": "dist/two"
      }
    ]
  }

Bundle options

For each bundle, the following options are available:

Option	Description
url	The URL of the zip to download. Supports zip, tar, or tar.gz files. You can include {$version} in the URL which will be replaced by the version of the package being installed (eg. v1.0.0).
path	Where the zip should be extracted relative to your package's root. Defaults to dist.
name	Name of the bundle which will be displayed in the Composer output. Defaults to dist.