How To Install Composer on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Composer on Debian 9 Stretch. For those of you who didn’t know, Composer is an incredible dependency manager tool used to install and upgrade libraries for dynamic, PHP applications and projects. This software is used to facilitate the installation and update of the project dependencies which also show the appropriate versions required for the project requirements.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation Composer on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Install Composer on Debian 9 Stretch

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install curl php-cli php-mbstring git unzip

Step 2. Installing Composer on Debian.

Enter the following commands to download Composer Setup:

cd ~
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer -o composer-setup.php

You should verify that the installer matches the SHA-384 hash for the data integrity of the latest installer found on the Composer Public Keys or Signatures page by running the following command:

HASH="$(wget -q -O - https://composer.github.io/installer.sig)"

Check if the installation script is corrupted:

php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '$HASH') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"

Now run the following command to install Composer globally inside /usr/local/bin directory:

sudo php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

Then, run the following command to confirm the installation:

composer

Output:

______
  / ____/___  ____ ___  ____  ____  ________  _____
 / /   / __ \/ __ `__ \/ __ \/ __ \/ ___/ _ \/ ___/
/ /___/ /_/ / / / / / / /_/ / /_/ (__  )  __/ /
\____/\____/_/ /_/ /_/ .___/\____/____/\___/_/
                    /_/
Composer 1.6.3 2019-02-12 16:46:18

Usage:
  command [options] [arguments]

Options:
  -h, --help                     Display this help message
  -q, --quiet                    Do not output any message
  -V, --version                  Display this application version
      --ansi                     Force ANSI output
      --no-ansi                  Disable ANSI output
  -n, --no-interaction           Do not ask any interactive question
      --profile                  Display timing and memory usage information
      --no-plugins               Whether to disable plugins.
  -d, --working-dir=WORKING-DIR  If specified, use the given directory as working directory.
  -v|vv|vvv, --verbose           Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal output, 2 for more verbose output and 3 for debug

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Composer. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Composer on Debian 9 Stretch system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Composer website.