Give your Composer script a second name

A composer script is often named after the underlying tool, like phpstan, because that is the binary the script calls. But what if you or the team always refers to the tool as larastan because that is the plugin or package providing most of the functionality for your project? "Did Larastan catch that?" asks another programmer, even though composer.json says phpstan.

You could rename the script, but that might break things down the line like CI. Or maybe you just want it to be named phpstan out of convention.

So, let's use Composer's scripts-aliases key.

"scripts": {
    "phpstan": [
        "@php vendor/bin/phpstan analyse"
    ]
},
"scripts-aliases": {
    "phpstan": [
        "larastan"
    ]
}

Now composer phpstan and composer larastan both invoke the same script.

When an existing script name does not match the name you naturally type, an alias is the simplest fix.

Oh, and bonus: the alias value is an array, so you can even add common typos, if you're into that sort of thing.

Here to help,

Aaron

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