It was developed by Nils Adermann and Jordi Boggiano, who continue to manage the project.

[3] The project's dependency solving algorithm started out as a PHP-based port of openSUSE's libzypp SAT solver.

[4] Composer runs from the command line and installs dependencies (e.g. libraries) for an application.

It also allows users to install PHP applications that are available on "Packagist"[5] which is its main repository containing available packages.

Composer offers several parameters including :[6] Example of composer.json generated by the following command: The different authorized versions of the libraries are defined by:[7]