validate composer.json

[staabm]

phar-composer commands assume the composer.json provided is valid.

In case it is not valid it sometimes produces strange things, e.g. name a project "myproject" (without a vendor prefix, which of course is invalid).
-> it will create a "yproject.phar" (without the leading "m"). It took some time to find out, that this problems are caused by my invalid composer.json.

phar-composer could do a better job and do a composer validate before each runs its own commands. In case of errors, skip its own command and print the error.

[clue]

Interesting suggestion :-)

Right now, this project does not necessarily depend on composer at all. You can use this tool to bundle a local project directory without requiring composer.

I considered embedding composer (#11), in which case it certainly makes sense to also add a validation step.

What are your thoughts?

[staabm]

Not sure how much dev-time it would take to embbed composer and how big the resulting phar-composer will be. This 2 parameters would be the actual drivers IMO.

If this issue is the only reason for embedding composer we could also just use composer validate in case composer is available (which is very likely as you already mentioned in the referenced ticket).

[clue]

we could also just use composer validate in case composer is available

Sounds like a sane approach (sufficiently easy to implement independently of #11). Would you care to file a PR? :)

[staabm]

Will PR tomorrow

[kasperg]

An alternate approach would be to use justinrainbow/json-schema and the schema for composer.json.

[clue]

@staabm Thank you for the suggestion, I understand where you're coming from, but I'm having to close this as out of scope as per #88

Please report back and/or open a new PR if you feel this is still needed and we can reconsider this 👍