使用Composer仅在PHP中加载特定依赖项

Question

Let's say that I have a back-end running on a customized PHP environment (no Laravel nor Symfony). It is used as an API server most of the time. But once a day I need to send out some mails. Let's say that I use a dedicated tools for that: Twig to create bodies of the mails, and PHPMailer to send them out. I don't need neither of these to answer the incoming front-end requests.

My question is: can I ask Composer (which I use as a dependency manager) to exclude Twig and PHPMailer when compiling the code to answer the front-end requests?

Obviously, the example here would save me fractions of seconds, and fractions of RAM, but what if I have other dependencies that are used only for other purposes too?

Answer 1

Obviously, the example here would save me fractions of seconds, and fractions of RAM

It actually does not save you nothing. Composer's autoloader loads class only when you request it. If you never use Twig or PHPMailer in your frontend request, it will never load it, so no RAM or CPU will be used.

Basically it already works in a way you would like to.