Installing PHP Composer globally on Windows

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. PEAR used to be the go-to tool for managing PHP dependencies quite some time ago, but it was always cumbersome, and not much fun to use. Composer makes it very easy!

On Windows, you can use the .exe installer; note you will need PHP installed, and have the php.exe accessible. In this particular case, I will be using Cygwin shell, and have already installed PHP as a Cygwin package for it:

When installation is done, close and reopen your terminal:

You can now run the composer command from anywhere in your shell.

composer
   ______
  / ____/___  ____ ___  ____  ____  ________  _____
 / /   / __ \/ __ `__ \/ __ \/ __ \/ ___/ _ \/ ___/
/ /___/ /_/ / / / / / / /_/ / /_/ (__  )  __/ /
\____/\____/_/ /_/ /_/ .___/\____/____/\___/_/
                    /_/
Composer version 1.0-dev

Opening files in Notepad++ from Cygwin

Notepad++ is an improved text editor instead of standard Vim in the command line, and especially improves upon using classic Notepad. It is superior, even if only for the syntax highlighting making things more readable. This is an alias function that seeks to implement a GUI-based text editor into Cygwin shell, and to run it as a daemon in the background, instead of seizing control over the terminal window for as long as the editor is open.

np ()
{
/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Notepad++/notepad++.exe `cygpath.exe -w "$*"` &
}

Note that it needs to be a function, and not a vanilla alias, because aliases don't allow interpolated arguments. What this function does is open the executable Notepad++ file, then takes a path argument that has been converted from a Cygwin path to a Windows path. $* stores the aformentioned arguments that were entered on the command line, and the & lets the process run in the background. This lets you use Notepad++ from Cygwin without having the shell wait for an exit code. See here for bash scripting info.

Reload the shell:

. ~/.bashrc

Now we can open any text file by passing the filename as an argument along with our new alias function. Instead of using vim or another editor we can simply use Notepad++ like so:

np ~/mycooltextfile.txt

You can even create text files this way - by specifying a filename that doesn't exist yet, it will be created for you!

Cygwin shell setup and bash-style tweaks

We have already seen how Cygwin can bring some great quality-of-life improvements as an alternative to using the native Windows terminal. Cygwin closely emulates a Unix shell, but there are still some differences.

The Home directory for Cygwin shell is probably not where you might think it should be. It is actually located within the Cygwin install directory (i.e. C:\Program Files\cygwin\home\User):

cd ~
pwd
/home/User

Since this isn't technically your Windows user's home directory, it will be empty, aside from config files that are used to emulate the Unix environment. As an example, you would navigate to C:\Users\User\My Documents like below (note how spaces need to be escaped by using backslashes):

cd /cygdrive/c/Users/User/My\ Documents/

Packages and programs are also not installed via command line. Instead, as explained in an earlier post, you would need to re-run the Cygwin setup.exe, which doesn't actually reinstall Cygwin from scratch, but just rebuilds it from existing packages, as well as any new ones you add during this subsequent install.

Aliases are a neat way to improve your workflow, and setting some up in Cygwin is really no different than Unix. Let's add some aliases (all config files are in the Cygwin home directory):

vi ~/.bashrc

I usually uncomment the ll, ls, la aliases, and add a few, like this function to use Notepad++ as a GUI text editor instead of using Vim in the terminal. Vim isn't great in Cygwin (feels more buggy than its Unix counterparts), so a solid GUI alternative before resorting to vanilla Notepad, is the nicer Notepad++. Anyways, you can also set up simple navigational aliases if symbolic links aren't your thing:

alias pro='cd /cygdrive/d/Projects'

You can also turn off the annoying bell beep sound the shell makes when you enter something incorrect, or try to autocomplete something that doesn't exist. In your ~/.inputrc file, uncomment or add:

set bell-style none

Reload the shell, no need to close and reopen to pull in the changes:

// These two commands are identical:
source ~/.bashrc
. ~/.bashrc

And now you can enjoy your newly added shortcuts!

Replacing Windows cmd terminal with Console2 and Cygwin shell

In my last post I set up Cygwin to emulate a UNIX environment. We now have some added features that can be used via command line, but at the end of the day, Cygwin's shell is merely being invoked from the default Windows terminal. Yuck.

Console2 is an open-source replacement for Windows' native terminal. "Features include: multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles". So basically, it is all the goodness of UNIX terminals brought to Windows. As of the time of this writing, the last update to this software was done over a year ago, yet there are still 5000+ downloads a week from SourceForge - a great testament to its ongoing popularity.

After downloading the 32-bit package (don't bother looking for the nonexistent 64-bit version), simply extract the Console2 folder to your Program Files directory, and run the Console.exe program within. You should see something like this:

Ok... now it just looks like a windows shell inside our new terminal... which is exactly what it is, and is exactly the opposite of how Cygwin is currently running a UNIX shell inside the Windows terminal. Let's hook the two up!

Instead of invoking cmd to access the Windows terminal, you'll now be using Console2 as its replacement, so pin it, desktop it, shortcut it, whatever - you'll be using it from now on. In Console2's menu, select Edit -> Settings... and from the Console setting in the sidemenu, point the unconfigured Shell to Cygwin.bat. Note that you may have to view All Files in the Files of Type dropdown:

It also won't hurt to set up a few sane copy/paste/mouse commands, and these can be done from the Hotkeys and Hotkeys -> Mouse settings. It is strange that Console2 isn't configured out-of-the-box to select text with the mouse cursor, but this is a nice quality-of-life improvement that we take for granted on a Unix terminal. As for copy/paste shortcuts, don't choose Ctrl+C for copying. Cygwin seems unable to distinguish between the shell being process-locked versus not, so Ctrl+C cannot be used for both copying and halting - the user definition overrides the innate process-halting definition.

Close Console2 after saving your settings, and reopen it to Cygwin's glorious UNIX shell within the enhanced goodness of Console2!

Setting up Git, SVN, curl and SSH on Windows using Cygwin terminal

I have previously mentioned that on my home computer, which is a Windows-running machine, I use Cygwin shell with a Console2 terminal. I have gotten used to Unix commands and infrastructure as I use them at work, and the Windows CLI just felt... well, flat in comparison.

Cygwin and Console2 are a nice remedy to implement a familiar interface for Windows. Let's start with Cygwin.

In their own words, Cygwin is "a large collection of GNU and Open Source tools which provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows". And frankly, this is the least finicky way I've been able to use Git on Windows. A lot of other GUI-based Git interfaces are pretty bad, and it's always better practices to learn and know the command line commands. So, speaking of, once you downloaded Cygwin, you choose your install directory, as well as a downloaded packages directory - it is here that "modules" such as Git gets installed into Cygwin. Get to know and love the Packages interface in Cygwin, chances are that if you are missing a module and need to install it later, you will be running Cygwin's installation program again (which now skips right to the packages window) to add what you need.

For a first-time install, I usually kick off my setup with a few choice packages such as:

• vim (ironically for a UNIX emulator, this is actually not enabled by default)
• OpenSSH
• AutoSSH
• PHP interpreter
• curl
• PHP-curl
• Git (be sure to select the ca-certificates and libsasl2 packages as well - oddly they are not chosen as dependencies (unless you install the curl package as above). See here for more info, else you'll be running into "cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" HTTPS git errors!)
• Git/SVN
• lib-mcrypt

These make it convenient to run commands straight from the Cygwin shell, for example if I need to run a quick cURL call or something. The SSH client is pure command line, so no need to fiddle around with crappy Windows GUI clients or yet another terminal emulator like PuTTY.

After selecting your desired Cygwin packages, you can complete the installation, noting the prompt to install dependencies for your selected packages. I usually go back and disable a few at this point, because - for example - blanket enabling the entire PHP5 package would then enable other packages like PHP5-apache2, which then have their own dependencies like the large Apache2 package which I personally won't need at all.

After installing, you can open your Cygwin shell, and see something like this message on the first load:

Copying skeleton files.
These files are for the users to personalise their cygwin experience.

They will never be overwritten nor automatically updated.

'./.bashrc' -> '/home/User//.bashrc'
'./.bash_profile' -> '/home/User//.bash_profile'
'./.inputrc' -> '/home/User//.inputrc'
'./.profile' -> '/home/User//.profile'

User@location ~
$ |

Right now, you're probably thinking that it's nice to have a UNIX shell, but the default Windows terminal that still wraps it is not very nice. I am of the same opinion. In the next post we will spruce things up a bit with Console2, entirely replacing the vanilla cmd terminal that the Cygwin shell still defaults to, and in a future post go over some Cygwin-specific tips.