Composer Linker: The NPM link for PHP Developers

Hi HN, I'm the author of this blog post.

As a PHP developer, I’ve always envied how easy it is in the JavaScript world to link local packages using npm link. Composer doesn’t have an official equivalent, and managing local packages in monorepos or across projects can be painful.

So I wrote a tool called Composer Linker, inspired by NPM’s linking behavior. It’s a small wrapper around Composer that makes it easy to symlink packages locally while keeping composer.json and composer.lock happy.

If you're working on Laravel packages, multi-package repositories, or trying to test packages across multiple projects, this might save you some time.

I’d love any feedback, ideas, or critiques — especially from devs who’ve built tooling around Composer or package development workflows.

Thanks for reading!