If you are managing your WordPress installation with composer, sooner or later you will face the situation where you need to install a 3rd-party plugin that does not support composer natively.
For example the new plugin “create-content-model” which is not yet published on the WordPress plugin directory. However this plugin is hosted at GitHub and can be used with composer by defining its repository within your project’s composer.json file.
Add the following block under the ‘repositories’ directive within the composer.json file:
{
"type": "package",
"package": {
"name": "automattic/create-content-model",
"version": "0.0.2",
"type": "wordpress-plugin",
"dist": {
"url": "https://github.com/Automattic/create-content-model/releases/download/0.0.2/create-content-model.zip",
"type": "zip"
}
}
}The repository type “package” is used for composer packages that do not yet support composer.
The package name should contain the vendor and package name separated by a forward slash. (There might be issues with uppercase and special characters upstream developers sometimes use.)
The version should be a valid composer style version of the package.
Type, in our case is going to be “worpdress-plugin” so that the package lands in the correct directory.
The dist contains information about how the package will be fetched. In our case the GitHub URL, type is “zip” as we link to a zip package.
After the repository is in place one can just run the following command to install the new package:
composer require automattic/create-content-modelAt this point both composer.json and composer.lock will be updated to reflect the changes.