Should I "composerize" my installation?

Question

So; having been involved with a D7 / CiviCRM build a number of years ago, I started building a D10/CiviCRM build as a project to suggest to my local organisation.

I think I might have caused myself an issue though, as I installed D10 manually, then went on to install CiviCRM using composer.

• I have D10 installed on my VPS at /var/www/html/[site]
• I have CiviCRM installed at /home/[user]/

So the question really is; should I composerize D10 and move it to the home/[user] folder? Would using composer to update Civi break my D10 if I continued manually updating it?

Answer 1

Yes, you should basically always use Composer to install Drupal 10+.

Midway through the Drupal 8 development cycle, composer use became mainstream, and now some contrib modules only support installation via composer. Even if you are not using such modules, the documentation will assume you have a composer installation and installing manually may lead to difficult to debug issues. It is also slower than using composer once you get the hang of it.

Although the above comments are about Drupal 10 in general, the CiviCRM docs also state that you should use composer to install Drupal.

As an aside, composer pairs well with git, so you can commit your composer.lock and use that to deploy to your VPS from your local machine, which is less error prone and faster (once set up) than manually updating.