Install Yii2 Extension Manually Without Using Composer

Install Yii2 extension manually without using Composer

It's highly recommended to use composer instead.

But if you want to do it manually:

1) Download archive of needed version from Github.

2) Open composer.json.

3) Find PSR-4 autoload section and remember it, in your case: kartik/select2.

4) Extract files to corresponding folder in vendor: vendor/kartik/select2 (not yiisoft!).

5) Add to vendor/composer/autoload_psr4.php:

'kartik\\select2\\' => array($vendorDir . '/kartik/select2'),

6) Add to vendor/yiisoft/extensions.php:

'kartik/select2' => array (
    'name' => 'kartik/select2',
    'version' => '2',
    'alias' => array (
        '@kartik/select2' => $vendorDir . '/kartik/select2',
    ),
),

samdark, one of the core contributors has the article in russian about it on his official blog here. It's basically brief translated version.

As you can see it's quite a lot of work to do. Multiply it by number of extensions and it becomes pain.

Seriously, use composer. If the hoster doesn't support it, find another one.

how to add extensions to vendor manually in yii2

I suppose you have have used composer to install Yii2;

Use composer to add the required package:

composer require raiym/instagram-php-scraper

How do I install Composer PHP packages without Composer?

The composer.json file lists the dependencies. In your example:

"require": {
    "php": ">=5.5.0",
    "guzzlehttp/guzzle": "^6.0",
    "psr/http-message": "^1.0",
    "psr/log": "^1.0"
},

You must then find the corresponding packages in the packagist site. Repeat the same process for each dependency: find additional dependencies in their corresponding composer.json files and search again.

When you finally have a complete list of the required packages, you only need to install them all one by one. For the most part, it's just a matter of dropping the files somewhere in your project directory. But you must also ensure that PHP can find the needed classes. Since you aren't using Composer's auto-loader, you need to add them to your own custom autoloader. You can figure out the information from the respective composer.json files, e.g.:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": { "Coinbase\\Wallet\\": "src/" }
},

If you don't use a class auto-loader you'll need to figure out the individual require_once statements. You'll probably need a lot of trial and error because most library authors won't care documenting that.

Also, and just in case there's confusion about this:

Composer has an official GUI installer for Windows and a copy and paste command-line installation procedure for all platforms.
Composer can be run locally and its output just uploaded elsewhere. You don't need SSH in your shared hosting.
The command needed to install a library can be copied and pasted from the package web site—even if the package maintainer didn't care to document it, packagist.org generates it by default.

Composer is not perfect and it doesn't suit all use cases but, when it comes to installing a library that relies on it, it's undoubtedly the best alternative and it's a fairly decent one.

I've checked other answers that came after mine. They mostly fall in two categories:

Install a library and write a custom download script with it
Use an online web based interface for Composer

Unless I'm missing something, none of them address the complaints expressed by the OP:

Learning curve
Use of third-party software
Possibility to develop right on the server (using SSH, I presume)
Potentially deep dependency tree

Composer is not working for installing yii2 extensions

Use the following command to remove the permission warning and to make sure your user has permissions on the global composer folder.
```
sudo chown -R kaushalendra:<YOUR_GROUP> /home/kaushalendra/.composer
```
Note: to lookup which group your user belongs to
```
groups kaushalendra
```
For me, it shows the following groups
```
omeraslam : omeraslam sudo www-data docker
```
after : all are the groups my user is assigned i can use omeraslam as username and omeraslam as group so for me the command will be sudo chown -R omeraslam:omeraslam /home/kaushalendra/.composer
Then run the following command on terminal
```
sudo apt-get install php-curl
```
Then restart apache
```
sudo service apache2 restart
```

Install Yii2 Extension Manually Without Using Composer