Installation - Linux / Unix / OSX#
Downloading the Composer Executable#
Composer offers a convenient installer that you can execute directly from the commandline. Feel free to download this file or review it on GitHub if you wish to know more about the inner workings of the installer. The source is plain PHP.
There are in short, two ways to install Composer. Locally as part of your project, or globally as a system wide executable.
Locally#
Installing Composer locally is a matter of just running the installer in your project directory. See the Download page for instructions.
The installer will just check a few PHP settings and then download composer.phar to your working directory. This file is the Composer binary. It is a PHAR (PHP archive), which is an archive format for PHP which can be run on the command line, amongst other things.
Now just run php composer.phar in order to run Composer.
You can install Composer to a specific directory by using the --install-dir option and additionally (re)name it as well using the --filename option. When running the installer when following the Download page instructions add the following parameters:
php composer-setup.php --install-dir=bin --filename=composer
Now just run php bin/composer in order to run Composer.