Developing a WordPress Plugin

[hirasso]

I am making a WordPress plugin called ThumbHash Placeholders.

I used php-scoper to create a scoped release asset. This means I have a version of the plugin that is less likely to cause conflicts with other plugins. I plan to use this for the WP.org plugin directory.

Installing via Composer

Another way to install WordPress plugins is through Composer and Packagist. A popular project for this is Roots/Bedrock.

• If someone uses the command composer require hirasso/thumbhash-placeholders, they will not get the scoped version.
• They will get the unscoped version from the latest tag on the main branch.

If users get the unscoped version, it could lead to conflicts with other plugins or packages.

My Main Question

What is the best way to scope a package when releasing it to Packagist?

• I can’t just use the main branch.
• Even with a scoped vendor directory, the composer.json file might still cause conflicts with other packages.

I hope this makes sense! I think many others have similar questions.

[theofidry]

What is the best way to scope a package when releasing it to Packagist?

I think it depends on how you want to distribute your scoped asset: if it is as a PHAR only it can be part of the main project (like it is done with PHP-Scoper or Box). If you want to distribute a scoped Composer package, then you need a separate repository with the scoped code, like PHPStan does for instance. In that case you'll need a bit more work to configure the CI to push code to that scoped mirror-ish repository

[hirasso]

I want to release it via composer. Ok, seems like I need to learn even more GitHub tooling for creating that scoped version 🥴 ...or I wait until someone complains 😅

[hirasso]

An official recipe for pushing or pulling the build folder to a separate repo for composer would be amazing. That way, it would probably feel less hacky.

[theofidry]

A more automated way would be amazing, but unfortunately scoping in PHP is, unlike in JS for instance, a lot more finicky.

I couldn't really find a canonical way to do this yet as several projects that used PHP-Scoper tended to have a few steps done besides just shipping a "build" directory.

I need to learn even more GitHub tooling for creating that scoped version

And I would need to learn how to do a GitHub recipe too 😅

[hirasso]

If you'd like me to present my current state to you and discuss possible solutions together, I'd love to hear from you via email (in my profile) so that we can jump on a call sometime soon.

I can imagine talking it through could help a lot in this case 🙂

[hirasso]

I have created an issue over at the Packagist rep to discuss this further. Seems like maintaining a separate repository currently is indeed the "official" way for releasing a scoped / built package.