composer

Sometimes having repos available via http/git is just too much effort, especially when you have your local VCS all setup for development already.

Those local repos can be added as individual repos on the command line.

Cheat sheet for using composer init to create your composer.json.

https://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md#init

Composer can have packages installed system-wide, such as the infinitely useful and should be included in core already, Prestissimo which greatly speeds up install and updates of other packages.

NB: This appears not to work. Can symlink a user's ~/.composer to the directory to share things, but it doesn't work entirely brilliantly.

Download "signed" installer for PHP Composer.

Signature is in quotes because this really doesn't prove or provide any kind of signature or authentication - it's just a SHA384 hash of the installer executable. The only possible security is that the installer and signature are available via different web servers, but this isn't enforced. A real signature would be better. Every commit is signed which makes the situation even more confusing.