Composer is the preferred dependency management solution for PHP. List your project's dependencies in a composer.json file and, after issuing a few commands in the CLI, Composer will automatically download your project's dependencies and set up autoloading for you. Composer is analogous to NPM in the Node.js world, or Bundler in the Ruby world.

Drupal core uses Composer to manage non-Drupal dependencies like Guzzle and PHPUnit. An increasing number of contributed modules also use Composer to integrate third party PHP libraries into Drupal.

This series provides guidance for Drupal developers and site builders who would like to learn to use Composer to build and maintain a Drupal application.

It covers high-level concepts about Composer and walks you step-by-step through creating a new application, downloading PHP libraries, and implementing them using Composer!

It also covers Drupal-specific Composer configuration and provides guidance for accomplishing common Drupal tasks like updating core and installing a new module.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Familiarize ourselves with the general concepts of dependency management
• Learn about Composer and the role it plays in a PHP/Drupal project
• Learn about some advantages and disadvantages of using Composer

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to explain what Composer is, what it's used for, and make the case for using it in your own projects.

There's been a lot written about API design, it's probably not surprising there are several books written about the subject. It also seems like nearly every cloud-based service provides an API to allow access to your data. In this tutorial, we'll attempt to condense this information and answer the following questions:

• Are there different types of API paradigms?
• What kinds of considerations do we need to make when building an API for our decoupled site?
• And, what's this REST thing everyone is talking about?

Let's dig into those questions one at a time.

If you're interested in decoupling Drupal, there's a good chance you've heard at least some of the buzz in the Drupalverse about "headless" or decoupled Drupal. Or perhaps you watched Dries' keynote from DrupalCon Barcelona or read Dries' blog post about the future of decoupled Drupal. Whatever the case may be, this tutorial and the ones that follow will walk you through building a simple decoupled blog. In Dries' terminology the demo site we'll be building is "fully decoupled." While it would be trivial to adopt similar techniques to build a progressively decoupled site, let's dig a bit deeper into what it means to build a decoupled Drupal site.

Andrew Berry, from Lullabot, has written a great article asking Should you Decouple? Like most architectural decisions there are trade-offs to consider with a decoupled approach. Let's take a look at some of the pros and cons of a decoupled approach. Is it the right choice for your project?

At this point, whether we've decided to use a third-party pre-rendering service or we've written our own isomorphic JavaScript application to serve as the front-end of our website, our hosting requirements have definitely gotten more complex. Let's take a look at the continuum of decoupled site architectures and start to come up with a list of things to keep in mind when considering their hosting requirements.