Release Belt — Composer repo for ZIPs

Release Belt is a Composer repository, which serves to quickly integrate third–party non–Composer releases into Composer workflow. Once Release Belt is installed and you upload your zip files with their respective version number, Release Belt does the rest.

Given the following folder tree:

releases/wordpress-plugin/rarst/plugin.1.0.zip

It will serve the following Composer repository at /packages.json automagically:

{
    "packages": {
        "rarst/plugin": {
            "1.0": {
                "name": "rarst/plugin",
                "version": "1.0",
                "dist": {
                    "url": "http://example.com/rarst/plugin.1.0.zip",
                    "type": "zip"
                },
                "type": "wordpress-plugin",
                "require": {
                    "composer/installers": "^1.5"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Installation

1. Install the project

Release Belt is a project type Composer package. It is recommended to use Git checkout to keep up with updates more easily.

There is a helper Composer script provided that tries to fetch latest stable version and performs Composer install.

Install

git clone https://github.com/Rarst/release-belt
cd release-belt
composer belt-update

Update

composer belt-update

2. Place release ZIPs into releases/ directory

The directory structure should be: releases/[type]/[vendor name]/[release zip file].

A [type] could be:

• a native Composer type (e.g. library for the default);
• any type composer/installers supports (e.g. wordpress-plugin);
• or completely arbitrary.

3. Configure a web server

The public/ directory should be used as web root and index.php in it as the file to handle requests.

Please refer to web server configuration in Slim documentation and/or your web hosting’s resources for setup specifics.

Visit home page and /packages.json in a web browser to check if it is working.

Use

Once Release Belt is installed you can add the repository to the composer.json of your projects.

Release Belt home page will automatically generate some composer.json boilerplate for you to use.

Configuration

You can configure Release Belt by creating a config/config.php file, which returns an array of options to override.

See config/configExample.php for the annotated example.

Authentication & permissions

Release Belt implements HTTP authentication to password protect your repository and control access to specific packages. You can configure it via users configuration option.

There is a bin/encodePassword.php command line helper included for hashing passwords:

>php bin/encodePassword.php foo
$2y$10$3i9/lVd8UOFIJ6PAMFt8gu3/r5g0qeCJvoSlLCsvMTythye19F77a

If authentication is enabled, Release Belt home page will automatically generate auth.json boilerplate for you to use.

F.A.Q.

Why not Packagist/Satis?

Composer infrastructure is awesome, but it expects vendors that are willing to play nice with it.

Release Belt is a solution for unwilling vendors and it was faster and easier to build a dedicated solution from scratch.

Why not artifacts?

Composer artifacts require composer.json in them. This is for releases that don’t even have that.

But is it web scale?

No.

License

MIT