Testing Incremental Plugin Changes In CakePHP

I've been working on a project that comprises of multiple (private) plugins that are all under active development. During the development process I've discovered running composer update vendor/plugin to be not only tedious, but a huge bottleneck to rapid development. It's also not very convenient for web testing small changes to things like CSS or JavaScript, since changes must be committed and pushed before running composer on the main project.

Local repositories

One nice feature of composer is the ability to specify local repositories. This allows you to develop locally and let composer pull from your local drive. While nice, this still doesn't solve the problem of having to commit every little change in order to see how the plugin looks and behaves in the main app's context.

Local plugins

The solution? Local Cake plugins. Perhaps this feature is a remnant of a time before composer, but it certainly gets the job done. Using Cake's local (or legacy) plugin settings, we can develop plugins locally without committing and updating each time to check out changes. This allows us to develop quickly and still keep purposeful commits in the public repo when we're ready to commit.

In the main app's config/bootstrap.php:

Plugin::load('<vendor>/<plugin>', [
    'routes' => true,
    'bootstrap' => true,
    // the path key allows us to tell Cake where the plugin is
    'path' => '/path/to/plugin',
    // don't use composer's autoload (i.e., from vendor/)
    'autoload' => true
]);

What's great about this is that Cake will update the autoloader to point to the local repository, rather than load from the vendor/ directory like you would normally. No need to mess with composer.json.