Yesterday I talked about running composer on Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk.  There it is builtin and works out of the box for you.  If you are on OpenShift (my preferred PaaS) composer does not come out of the box.  Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted an article on the steps he took to get composer installing his project's dependencies, and that's definitely a worthy read.  However, my deployment hook for OpenShift is a little bit different and I wanted to share that.

There were two things I wanted to accomplish.  First, I did not want composer.phar in source control.  Second, I wanted to take advantage of composer's ability to cache dependencies to speedup my deployment process up.  So here is what I use in my ./.openshift/action_hooks/deploy script:

https://gist.github.com/stanlemon/5177925

As a bonus here's a tip about markers... OpenShift will restart Apache and Zend Server with every deployment. You may not want or need to do this. If you don't, simply touch a file to ./.openshift/markers/hot_deply and then next time you push your changes up OpenShift will leave all those services running when it deploys.