Working with a book from ever dependable O’Reilly Publishing on PHP, MySQL, JavaScript.
Installed Aptana Studio which is an Intergated Development Environment that works w/ php, HTML, css, javascript that runs on Snow Leopard OS 10.6.
Had to install Git in order to have access to Boilerplate HTML 5 – Git grants you access to online repositories of latest versions of available libraries.
Installed Composer and configured to work with MAMP with the help of this helpful tutorial. If you do this, remember to log in and out of Terminal when it says to so you won’t waste the time I did wondering why the changes in system hadn’t taken effect.
Then ran composer install from within the directory I’m developing the code in to pull in the necessary code based on the composer.json file in the same directory.
At the moment, Aptana is not importing the code successfully so seemed like a good time to document some of the process here for reference.
It’s all starting to make sense now. I hadn’t realized that the Composer application not only assembles your various libraries, it also downloads the referenced code, similar to the Git program. Both of them run on the command line, aka via Terminal. There might actually be a version of Git (from Github) that runs as an osX application.
I had initially had a ton of frustration trying to figure out why this library of Mindbody Online API code written in PHP wasn’t working. I had downloaded it from github, but none of the calls were working. After finally doing the composer install I see that it really is so f’n easy once you know what you’re doing. All you need to do (once composer is working – see above) is create the single composer.json file within the directory you want the code in and run the command line install command as posted above (which might actually be composer.phar install as opposed to simply composer install, depending on whether you have set composer for all users or just a single user) and it installs the whole thing for you. Nice. – Twenty hours later.
The initial problem had been that the damn “vendor” folder doesn’t seem to exist in the github repository as far as I can see.
I had created a “project” in Aptana prior to installing composer and things got weird so had to uninstall Aptana (I thought, anyway) and recreate the project using the import method described here. In fact I think I only would have needed to delete the .project and .metadata folders within their respective directories. But at one point Aptana was writing blank files over all of my files. Annoying.
So now I’m finally at the beginning. Or a beginning.