Use a GitHub Branch as a Composer Dependency

My current project sees Celery (a python distributed task queue) added to my PHP application. There's a handy PHP interface to the RabbitMQ that Celery uses as a backend, which makes it easy for me to create jobs, called celery-php. This requires either the PECL AMQP extension or alternatively it has experimental support for the PHP library for AMQP - I would normally prefer the PECL version but ran into version compatibility problems, missing manual pages, and decided that a pure PHP solution might be more portable and perhaps I would just add the experimental branch to my composer.json file for this project.

The branch is called php-amqplib, and I need to do two things:

• Add the Github repository for celery-php to the composer.json, so that it will be picked up rather than Composer looking on packagist for it.


• Specify the version as dev-[branchname]

The result looks like this:

{
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "git",
            "url": "https://github.com/gjedeer/celery-php"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "videlalvaro/php-amqplib": "2.2.*",
        "massivescale/celery-php": "dev-php-amqplib"
    }
}

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, author and trainer, available for work (interesting projects only). This post was originally published at LornaJane

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