Install and Use Composer on Your Hosting Account

Composer, the PHP dependency manager, is installed and used from the command line on your hosting account, either with cPanel’s Terminal tool or via SSH. Composer installs the libraries your project needs in a vendor folder within the project itself.

Before you begin

• You need command-line access to your account: cPanel’s Terminal tool or an SSH client such as Putty. The SSH access port is 4444. If you have any questions, follow the guide How to access via SSH.

• The latest version of Composer requires PHP 7.2.5 or later. You can check or change your account’s PHP version by following the guide Change PHP version and settings.

Download and install Composer

We install Composer by downloading its official installer and running it with PHP:

1. In Terminal, navigate to the /tmp directory:

   cd /tmp

2. Download and run the official Composer installer:

   curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

   The installer checks your PHP configuration and downloads the composer.phar file, which is the Composer executable.

Make the composer command available

We move composer.phar to a folder in your user’s PATH and add it to your shell configuration:

1. We create the ~/bin folder and move the executable there, renaming it composer:

   mkdir ~/bin
   mv composer.phar ~/bin/composer
   chmod +x ~/bin/composer

2. We add the folder to the PATH and reload the configuration:

   echo "export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile
   source ~/.bash_profile

Verify the installation

Check that the command is available and see which version was installed:

1. Check the executable path:

   which composer

   It should return ~/bin/composer.

2. Check the version:

   composer --version

Install packages with Composer

Find the package you need on Packagist, the official PHP package repository, and install it with composer require from your project folder. For example, to install Bootstrap:

composer require twbs/bootstrap

Composer downloads the package and its dependencies and puts them in the project’s vendor folder.