PSR4 Carga automática de archivos PHP con Composer

In this article, we'll go through a brief introduction on setting up PSR4 Autoloading using Composer within your project.

To follow along, you should have the understanding of the following requisites.

• Learn how to install Composer on your machine.
• Understand the concept of Composer

Until now, you should have installed Composer and possibly created a composer.json file using composer init. If not, you can create one manually now in your project's root.

$ touch composer.json

Setup PSR4 Autoloading

As we're concerned about setting up PSR4 autoloading here, we'll edit the composer.json file to do so.

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/"
    }
}

What's happening here?

Here the most basic thing to understand is the vendor and application.

• App is vendor name of your application, you can use this name while namespacing files inside of your app directory, such as:

namespace App/User;

Also Read: Learn more about Namespaces in PHP.

• app is your application's directory, you want to autoload.

Generate Vendor and AutoLoad files

Open up your terminal and type in the following command to install autoloading files in your project.

$ composer dump-autoload -o

This will generate the vendor directory and autoload.php file inside of it.

Use Case

You just need to require once the autoload.php file once into your index.php file & you're all set to go.

require_once('vendor/autoload.php');

Practical Example

We'll go through the practical usage of using setting up PSR-4 autoloading in your project, you'll have to follow along.

Winding up the Basics

• Let's create a new project and create an app directory inside of it.
• Create a composer.json file and prepare it to autoload files inside your app directory. You should know how to do it now. If not, here it is

Also Read: How to use PHP Arrays

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/"
    }
},

• Run composer dump-autoload to generate the vendor directory and autoload.php

$ composer dump-autoload -o

• Let's first create  a couple of classes inside of app directory
• Create Settings.php inside app/Config

Also Read: 5 Tips to become a better PHP Developer

<?php
namespace App\Config;
class Setings {
   //TODO
}

• Create Utils.php inside app/Helpers

<?php
namespace App\Helpers;
class Utils {
   //TODO
}

• Create a new bootstrap.php file inside app directory. This is how I used to do it. You can do it directly inside your index.php file.

<?php
require __DIR__ .'/../vendor/autoload.php';

• Finally, create an index.php file to test it out.

Read More: Remove index.php from Laravel

<?php
require 'app/bootstrap.php';
$config = new App\Config\Settings();
var_dump($config);

You should be able to see the Object class returned in your terminal, like so:

object(App\Config\Settings)#3 (0) {

}

Read more about Namespacing classes in PHP.

Final Words

Well that's it. You're all set to create new classes in your app's directory by simply forgetting to include every single file every single time. Composer is like a lifeline in today's world for all your PHP applications, so make sure to utilise it to its fullest while you can.
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