User:SamanthaNguyen/Guides/Writing an extension

composer.json
The  file is a file for managing PHP packages published under Composer, a package manager for PHP. In MediaWiki, we use this file to install tools to help us lint our code to conform to the standard PHP coding conventions using Codesniffer, as well as check for executable files with MinusX.

As an extension developer, you usually don't have to worry about keeping up with the latest version for each package. When an extension is hosted in Wikimedia, a tool called Libraryupgrader will periodically update all repositories to use the latest versions of the packages. If for some reason though, you would like to manually update these packages, you can either manually update the file, or run.