Installing and Managing Composer Packages

Composer is PHP's dependency manager, and it's how Laravel itself, along with virtually every third-party package, gets pulled into a project.

Installing a Package

composer require spatie/laravel-permission

This adds the package to composer.json, downloads it into the vendor folder, and — for Laravel packages using auto-discovery — registers its service provider automatically.

Updating and Removing Packages

composer update spatie/laravel-permission
composer remove spatie/laravel-permission

composer.json and composer.lock

Publishing Package Config and Assets

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\Permission\PermissionServiceProvider"

With package management covered, it's worth looking at a few packages that show up in almost every serious Laravel project.