Guides

Past your first install, the rest of what viv does day to day: the commands you reach for most, merging composer.lock without conflicts, running a project's tools and PHP version without a container, and moving a whole project over from Composer.

• Cheat sheet — the common commands, one line each.
• Merging composer.lock without conflicts — the merge driver and what it still can't resolve.
• viv.lock — the conflict-less lock format on its own, without composer.lock.
• A PHP per project — a self-contained PHP build pinned per project, no container.
• Running tools without installing them — viv x, npx-style.
• Workspaces — one resolve and one vendor/ across several composer.json files.
• Scripts and running commands — viv run, viv exec, and lifecycle scripts.
• Automatic normalisation — a composer.json that never gets a reordering-only diff.
• Plugins — which Composer plugins viv reimplements, ignores or refuses.
• Two plugins, one library — prefixing a plugin's bundled dependencies, and why it stays opt-in.
• Speed — the benchmark numbers and how they're kept honest release to release.
• Reasons to use viv, and reasons not to — the honest trade-offs.
• Scope — the commands, repositories and package types viv covers.
• Migrating from Composer — the shim, Dockerfiles and CI flags for moving a whole project over.
• For your framework — the local/Dockerfile/CI snippets and compatibility result for your framework starter.
• Cache and offline use — the shared store, --cache-dir and --offline.
• Troubleshooting — common errors and what to do about them.

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