If you're working with PHP and you can't find a vendor/ directory that you expect to see, that PHP codebase probably uses Composer:
Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the dependent libraries your project needs and it will install them in your project for you.
One surefire way to know that a project uses Composer (aside from reading its documentation) is to see if there are composer.json and composer.lock files (probably) in the root of the repository. These files define the project's dependencies.
To generate the vendor/ directory,
-
install Composer,
- there are a few ways to do this, and it is OS-dependent, but something like
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | phpshould work if you're on Linux or OSX,
- there are a few ways to do this, and it is OS-dependent, but something like
- open a terminal and
cdinto the project directory, - run
composer install,- depending on how you installed Composer, you may have to run
php composer.phar installinstead,
- depending on how you installed Composer, you may have to run
- wait for Composer to do its thing.
Composer will download your dependencies, putting the code into vendor/, and generate an autoloader class that hooks everything together. Depending on what the dependencies are it might also do other things, like linking all CLI binaries to vendor/bin/.