How to commit Composer vendor folder into Git repository?

Question

Can I setup .gitignore in such a way to allow Composer dependencies (the vendor directory) to live inside my repository?

Composers officially recommends that you "should not" do this. And it provides three reasons (https://getcomposer.org/doc/faqs/should-i-commit-the-dependencies-in-my-vendor-directory.md):

1. Large VCS repository size and diffs when you update code.
2. Duplication of the history of all your dependencies in your own VCS.
3. Adding dependencies installed via git to a git repo will show them as submodules. This is problematic because they are not real submodules, and you will run into issues.

All these three reasons do not matter to me. Also it may be possible that reason three could be obviated by a clever .gitignore.

If it is necessary for me to state a motivation for this question then my motivation is: CocoaPods does it this way and I like how CocoaPods works.

What exactly should I do in .gitignore to achieve this?

Answer 1

Simply remove any reference to /vendor from your .gitignore file. Then add and commit the vendor files.

Just be prepared to add 100+ megs of vendor library files to your repository.

Answer 2

In my case the following worked:

1. Remove vendor from .gitignore
2. Clear git's cache: git rm -r --cached .
3. Add files: git add .
4. Commit files: git commit.
5. Push files to main repo.

Answer 3

Do the following to commit vendor directory:

git add vendor 
git commit -m "Added vendor directory to source control"