How to Install Composer on Ubuntu / Linux

Composer is a popular dependency/package manager used in most PHP projects. If you are PHP developer, installing composer is the next step after you install the web and database servers on your development environment. Installing Composer is not that hard on Windows and the good news is it is even easier on Ubuntu, in my case Ubuntu 20.04.

Install PHP First

You need to install PHP first if it is not already available on your system.

First update the package managers datababse

sudo apt update

Next install PHP using the following command

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

Download and Install Composer

Installing Composer is very simple as it provides an installation wizard made with PHP.

Switch to your home directory and download composer installer.

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

Start installer using the command below

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

The installer will download and install composer automatically. When you see a message like below than you are done!

All settings correct for using Composer

Downloading... Composer (version 2.0.9) successfully installed to: /usr/local/bin/composer

Use it: php /usr/local/bin/composer

You can confirm the installation with the following command

composer --version

And if everything is ok you will see output like this

Composer version 2.0.9 2021-01-27 16:09:27

Congratulations and happy PHP coding.