[php] Composer: Command Not Found

From within the directory holding my composer.phar file, I can't execute any composer commands.

I can see Composer is running when I execute

php composer.phar 

But any direct composer statements fail.

Not sure if it matters but Composer was included within a cloned repository.

I just want to install a single Oauth library, then likely not touch Composer again for several months, so I don't need to run it globally. I'm just confused why I can't run Composer from within this directory.

This question is related to php composer-php

The answer is


This problem arises when you have composer installed locally. To make it globally executable,run the below command in terminal

sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

For CentOS 7 the command is

sudo mv composer.phar /usr/bin/composer

MacOS: composer is available on brew now (Tested on Php7+):

brew install composer

Install instructions on the Composer Docs page are quite to the point otherwise.


Step 1 : Open Your terminal

Step 2 : Run bellow command

          curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Step 3 : After installation run bellow command

          sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/

Step 4 : Open bash_profile file create alias follow bellow steps

           vim ~/.bash_profile

Step 5 : Add bellow line in bash_profile file

          alias composer="php /usr/local/bin/composer.phar"

Step 6 : Close your terminal and reopen your terminal and run bellow command composer


First I did alias setup on bash / zsh profile.

alias composer="php /usr/local/bin/composer.phar"

Then I moved composer.phar to /usr/local/bin/

cd /usr/local/bin
mv composer.phar composer

Then made composer executable by running

sudo chmod +x composer

This is for mac or ubuntu user, try this on terminal

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | sudo php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

I am using CentOS and had same problem.

I changed /usr/local/bin/composer to /usr/bin/composer and it worked.

Run below command :

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php sudo mv composer.phar /usr/bin/composer

Verify Composer is installed or not

composer --version