Installing October CMS from the installer appears to leave the developer in a limbo with regard to deploying the app later on. Essentially the absence of a composer.json file means dependencies cannot be installed. And the .gitignore file has a line for /vendor/ meaning you can't commit those in anyway. This leaves three options.

1. Remove the .gitignore line and commit dependencies. I don't think I need to say that I'm not a fan of this.
2. Add in a composer.json file and install over the current dependencies. This seems kinda nasty. But it's what I'm currently trying to do.
3. Simply commit as-is and then run php artisan october:up to get dependencies(?) and create the tables. This is mostly reasonable but I don't know for sure that dependencies are managed by the october CLI, I assume they are by october:update. Regardless, using this method it's impossible to add new dependencies for added functionality.

Where all of this really becomes a problem is when using a PaaS such as Heroku or Fortrabbit. Heroku pretty much expects a composer.json/composer.lock file and will automatically update or install based on it.

I appreciate that if I had used the clone install method this wouldn't be an issue, but it's a little late for that. Is there something I'm missing?

It's not decision, but related. https://github.com/octobercms/october/issues/317

Last updated 9 years ago

This is a good issue to bring up. If Composer is purposely left out of the installer, it should clearly say that (and suggest to clone instead of the installer if you want to use Composer).

For your problem, why is it late to use the clone method to install? I went through the same thing a bit ago -- and I just cloned and copied over my theme files and configuration files and I was done.

It's by no means too late - that's exactly what I did. I meant that it was too late to have done that - not that it's too late to do it now. If I'd known October install from the installer didn't support composer I absolutely would never have used it. In hindsight, an installer based install is a "dumb" solution, intended for people who want a "wordpress-like" install and deployment. I don't think that was clear from the outset.

I have now reinstalled from the clone, creating a new github repo, new heroku app, new vhost, etc. Hardly an optimum workflow considering one tiny textfile could make the whole process so much simpler.

In my case I just add missing files, such as composer.json and .gitignore files.