I am using Codeigniter since a year and I also started learning Laravel recently and I noticed that having a composer in your framework really helps you in a many ways.
I notice that the Codeigniter 3 has this option in config.php file to add a composer in it.
$config['composer_autoload'] = TRUE;
so I am thinking to add a composer in my CI.
Is it best practice to add a Composer in CI?
What should be the directory structure for that and is it work smoothly with the CI?
This is how I implemented composer in CodeIgniter 3.It is very easy. You have to install composer on your machine and I think you have it because you use laravel.
$config['composer_autoload'] = TRUE;
Now you have composer in your project. I will saw you an example like how to install mpdf using composer
composer require mpdf/mpdf
Now a vendor folder will be created inside application folder and inside vendor folder you can see all your packages downloaded by composer.
Now since you autoloaded composer now you can just use the code given by mpdf official manual like
function m_pdf(){
$mpdf = new mPDF();
// Write some HTML code:
$mpdf->WriteHTML('Hello World');
// Output a PDF file directly to the browser
$mpdf->Output();
}
You can install any packages in https://packagist.org/ like mpdf very simply like this. Remember you don't need to type require_once APPPATH.'/vendor/mpdf/mpdf/mpdf.php'; since you already autoloader composer. If not prefer to autoload composer you must type require_once APPPATH.'/vendor/mpdf/mpdf/mpdf.php' at the beginning of each controllers where you use the mpdf vendor libraries.
in my experience, the best way is installing composer and dependencies independent of CodeIgniter, like 'composer require ', and then give access to the packages in your base controller. add a file MY_Controller.php to application/core folder and make it extend CI_Controller. then add require_once(APPPATH . 'vendor/autoload.php') at the top. make all your controllers extend this base class, and you have access to all your packages. the same goes if you wanna access them in your models. make the base class MY_Model.php