Installing WordPress Plugins with Composer

I found out a cool usage for composer that I didn’t know about; use it for installing WordPress plugins. I use Phing to do all my deployments (slowly moving towards continuous integration with Jenkins). I wanted a way to get the plugin files and include them with my deployment automagicly. Composer can download and extracting the plugin archive file rather than using the gui in the wordpress admin. This task can be done when all your other required libraries are installed.

I wanted to install Contact Form 7. In order for this to work you need to download the plugin from a custom repository, so I setup my composer.json file something like this:

{
  "repositories": [
    {
      "type": "package",
      "package": {
        "name": "takayukister/contact-form-7",
        "type": "wordpress-plugin",
        "version": "4.3.1",
        "dist": {
          "type": "zip",
          "url": "https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/contact-form-7.4.3.1.zip"
        },
        "require": {
          "composer/installers": "v1.0.7"
        }
      }
    }
  ],
  "require": {
    "takayukister/contact-form-7": "4.3.1"
  },
  "extra": {
    "installer-paths": {
      "public_html/wp-content/plugins/{$name}/": [
        "type:wordpress-plugin"
      ],
      "public_html/wp-content/themes/{$name}/": [
        "type:wordpress-theme"
      ]
    }
  }
}

I set the name of the repo to the “takayukister/contact-form-7″ and then used that as it’s require name with the current version (right now 4.3.1). The paths in the “extra” section tell composer where to put the plugin once it’s installed.

In my Phing build.xml I could then run this before any packaging tasks:

<exec command="php composer.phar install" level="verbose" passthru="true" />

If there’s a better way to do this I’d like to hear it.