Lectern

Lectern is an async and concurrent rewrite of PHP's Composer package manager in Rust. Built with lots of help from ChatGPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.

Todo

Lectern is not a complete replacement for Composer just yet! Some things I haven't been able to test (as AI wrote that code), or aren't of high priority.

• Composer compatible plugin system
• Testing of private packages and git repositories

Benchmarks

This image is the performance comparison for Lectern and Composer cache hits on various different commands (lower is better):

Lectern is in orange, and clearly shows that Lectern is much faster than Composer! However, some commands are slower than Composer, but these commands are likely not used often.

This chart shows the average performance based on command category, and the execution time between Lectern and Composer for each category.

Check out the full Lectern v. Composer Benchmark Report for detailed performance comparisons and insights.

Commands

Cache location

• Lectern uses a global user cache directory by default. It will use $XDG_CACHE_HOME/lectern when the XDG environment is set, otherwise ~/.cache/lectern.
• To clear the cache manually, remove that directory (for example rm -rf ~/.cache/lectern).

Publishing (CI)

• A GitHub Actions workflow has been added to publish the crate to crates.io when a GitHub release is published: .github/workflows/publish.yml.
• You must add a repository secret named CRATES_IO_TOKEN (your crates.io API token) for publishing to work. The workflow uses this secret to run cargo publish.

lectern install

Installs the dependencies listed in the composer.json file. Equivalent to composer install.

lectern update

Updates the dependencies to the latest versions allowed by the composer.json file. Equivalent to composer update.

lectern check-outdated

Checks for outdated dependencies and displays the current and latest versions.

lectern search <package>

Searches for a package on Packagist and displays relevant results.

lectern require <package>

Adds a new dependency to the composer.json file and installs it.

lectern remove <package>

Removes a dependency from the composer.json file and uninstalls it.

lectern show <package>

Displays detailed information about a specific package.

lectern autoload

Shows the autoloader setup.

lectern init

Initializes a new project with a composer.json file.

lectern status

Lists installed packages and their statuses.

lectern licenses

Displays the licenses of installed dependencies.

lectern validate

Validates the composer.json file for correctness.