If you haven't taken a look at the Composer tool for package management in your PHP applications, you owe it to you and your development process to check it out. PHPMaster.com wants to help you out and has posted a new tutorial telling you all about the system and how to use it in your applications.

In this article I will introduce you to another great project, Composer. Maybe you’ve experienced the pain of working on a PHP application which uses third-party libraries and then trying to keep them and their dependencies up to date. If so, Composer can soothe your pain. Composer gets you the libraries you want at the versions you need. And if those libraries use other libraries, it can install those and manage them as well. Dependency management can be a hassle-free experience using Composer.

He includes the basics like getting it downloaded and installed (via a single-line curl command) and creating a sample "composer.json" file to pull down some libraries from the Laravel framework. He also includes a bit about making your own library a package and adding it to Packagist. For more information about Composer (and Packagist) see the project's main website.