If you are not a PHP developer and have no idea about composer then you can skip this article.

If you are a PHP developer then you must be using Composer for Dependency management then most of the time (just like almost every programmer) you must be doing composer install or composer update and then composer dumpautoload even on the Production Server (I was doing the same mistake).

By default composer install will install all the packages listed in the composer.json file and it is recommended to skip dev packages on Production Server.

so, here I am listing some useful composer commands which will help you to install only the required packages with proper auto-loading.

  1. Instead of composer dumpautoload use composer dumpautoload -o or composer du -o : composer dumpautoload -o will take more time that composer dumpautoload but after the command, the file autoloading will be faster due to PSR-0/4 autoloading to class-map.
  2. Instead of composer install use composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader: Composer by default installs all the packages from composer.json and --no-dev will prevent it from doing so. --optimize-autoload will optimize autoloader for after autoloading (as mentioned in point 1) post-installation.
  3. composer install recommendation for build scripts: If you are using a CI system then here is the recommended composer install command for build scripts: composer install --no-ansi --no-dev --no-interation --no-progress --no-scripts --optimize autoloader, what is does a. Skip Dev dependencies ( --no-dev) b. Optimize autoloader ( --optimize-autoload ) c. Stop installation scripts (might cause issue during the build but completely dependent on your business logic)( --no-scripts ) d. It will not print progress and will work without generating o/p or asking for any i/p ( --no-progress --no-interaction and --no-ansi )

You can read more about the composer CLI and all the options provided by the composer over here: https://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md

References:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21721495/how-to-deploy-correctly-when-using-composers-develop-production-switch

https://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md