Using Composer on Joomla 4 Topic is solved

[tmisiunas]

Hi.
I am trying to install the google/apiclient with Composer.
I go to mysite/libraries folder and then run the command
composer require google/apiclient:^2.0
And then Composer starts removing all the joomla libraries.
I do not understand why.
Please, help me.
I am in stuck with that.
P.S. Joomla version 4.1.2

[SharkyKZ]

Joomla does not support managing Composer dependencies. You need to ship the custom vendor folder in your extension. Using prefixer may be need to avoid conflicts with core dependencies.

[tmisiunas]

What about this article
https://docs.joomla.org/J3.x:Using_Composer_with_Joomla
What do You mean about to ship the custom vendor?
I can copy all the vendors to our libraries/vendor folder.
But what about autoloading?
Or should I use the php include/require commands in my extension?
Thanks a lot for Your help.

[SharkyKZ]

The last paragraph in that article clearly says you can't install extra libraries. It also explains why you're seeing this behavior — Joomla does not ship composer.json. Thus any composer command you run creates a new project from scratch with a new composer.json and so all existing packages are uninstalled.

To autoload classes you have to load just the vendor/autoload.php file.

[MarkRS]

I am (successfully) using the Google API.

I have the composer json and lock files in my component's administrator directory and therefore the vendor directory directory is there too. In order not to interfere with Joomla classes I've used Scoper to adjust the class names. This works perfectly well.

[Maradona]

In order not to interfere with Joomla classes I've used Scoper to adjust the class names.

What is Scoper?

[MarkRS]

What is Scoper?

GitHub - humbug/php-scoper: Prefixes all PHP namespaces in a file ...
PHP-Scoper is a tool which essentially moves any body of code, including all dependencies such as vendor directories, to a new and distinct namespace. Goal PHP-Scoper's goal is to make sure that all code for a project lies in a distinct PHP namespace.

The Google API uses names that the main Joomla js uses, so Scoper, moving the entire Google API (that I've loaded), keeps it separate from Joomla and prevents interference. At least, that's the way it seems to me.
It's a bit like the hand of God for js

[Maradona]

Good info...thank you!

[tmisiunas]

Thanks a lot to SharkyKZ.
You saved my life.