What's the recommended way to include vendor library dependencies in your plugins?

Question

My plugin requires vendor library dependencies and api keys set. What is the recommended way to register an external library? I would also like to configure the public api keys separately for stage and production environments — is there a way to set these in craft/config with the rest of the multi-environment configuration? Or is it better to create a plugin config file of some kind?

Currently I am having to include these in each of my service methods (and something similar again in my javascript files):

private function _saveStripeCustomer($account, $token = NULL)
{
    require_once(CRAFT_PLUGINS_PATH . 'businesslogic/vendor/stripe/lib/Stripe.php');
    \Stripe::setApiKey("sk_test_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx");

    // ...
}

I'm not familiar with composer. I don't know if that can perhaps help here.

Answer 1

Composer!

There's already a package for Stripe: https://packagist.org/packages/stripe/stripe-php

1. Install composer.

2. Add a composer.json file in your plugin's root folder.

3. Add this to the composer.json file:

   { "require": { "stripe/stripe-php": "1.17.2" } }

4. Run php composer.phar update from your plugin's root folder.

5. The library will be installed in a /vendor folder in your plugin.

6. Add an init() method to your main plugin's class file with this in it:

   require CRAFT_PLUGINS_PATH.'/pluginhandle/vendor/autoload.php';

And you're done.

Composer will handle autoloading all of the class files, so you don't need to worry about it.

If you ever want to update the Stripe library to a newer release, grab the version number from the packagist site, update your composer.json file with it and run php composer.phar update again.