How to install PHP Composer as a regular user

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Composer is an essential utility for PHP programmers, and allows you to manage dependencies.

Dependencies

You can use your regular account to install composer, use it, and even update it. You do need to have a few packages installed first though:

sudo apt-get install git curl php-cli

Or on Fedora:

sudo dnf install git curl php-cli

Local install

Next, fetch the installer and deploy composer to your home directory

curl https://getcomposer.org/installer > composer-setup.php
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
php composer-setup.php --install-dir=$HOME/.local/bin --filename=composer
rm composer-setup.php

Last, add ~/.local/bin to your $PATH:

echo 'PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
source  ~/.bashrc
echo $PATH

You can now run composer:

$ composer --help
Usage:
  help [options] [--] []
...
$ composer self-update
You are already using composer version 1.5.6 (stable channel).

Make Composer available for all users

Just run this line if you decide that all users should have access to your copy of Composer:

sudo mv ~/.local/bin/composer /usr/local/bin/composer

If you look up a how to install Composer, you will find a tempting one-liner that uses curl to fetch a script from the Composer website, then executes it as root. I don’t think it’s good practice to install software like that, so I would encourage you to just run ‘sudo mv’ at the end.

How to use parallel to speed up your work

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GNU Parallel is a tool to execute multiple commands at once. In its basic usage, you would list your commands in a file, so that it can execute them, several at a time.

It gives the most benefit on processes that don’t fully utilise your CPU. Almost every laptop, desktop and single board computer now has multiple CPU cores available, so you are probably missing out if you frequently perform batch operations without it.

Installation

On Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install parallel
parallel --cite

On Fedora the package name is the same:

sudo dnf install parallel
parallel --cite

Example 1: Convert loops to pipes

Using the ImageMagick tool to convert a folder of GIF images to PNG format can be done in a loop:

for i in *.gif; do convert $i -scale 200% ${i%.*}.png; done

Or, you could print each command in a loop then pass them to parallel.

for i in *.gif; do echo convert $i -scale 200% ${i%.*}.png; done | parallel

The second command is many times faster on a multi-core computer.

Example 2: Replace xargs with parallel

This command executes a single “pngcrush” command on each PNG file in a directory, one at a time.

find . -type f -name '*.png' -print0  | xargs -0 -n1 -r pngcrush -q -ow -brute

To convert this to use parallel, you would use the following command-line:

find . -type f -name '*.png' | parallel "pngcrush -q -ow -brute {}"

Don’t use xargs in parallel mode

Expert command line users will also know about xargs -P, which seems to do the same thing at a glance.

xargs is good at making really long command-lines, and not so good at executing multiple commands at once. It will mix the output of the commands, and requires you to specify the number of jobs to run.

Parallel is designed to do lots of things at once, and it does it well. It will choose some good defaults for the number of processes to execute, and adds an insane collection of features that you need for large batches. To name just a few:

  • Control spawning of new jobs based on things like available memory, system load, or an absolute number of jobs to keep running
  • Distribute jobs to remote computers
  • Show progress
  • Control of when to terminate the jobs