Drupal 8 and each minor version introduces new features and functionality: everything from moving the most commonly used third-party modules into its core to the introduction of an object-oriented PHP framework. These improvements also introduced the Symfony framework that brings in the ability to use a dependency management tool called Composer.

Composer (https://getcomposer.org/) is a dependency manager for PHP that allows us to perform a multitude of tasks: everything from creating a Drupal project to declaring libraries and even installing contributed modules, just to name a few. The advantage of using Composer is that it allows us to quickly install and update dependencies by simply running a few commands. These configurations are then stored within a composer.json file that can be shared with other developers to quickly set up identical Drupal instances.

If you are new to Composer, let's take a moment to discuss how to go about installing Composer for the first time within a local environment.