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Using Composer

No SSH on free hosting, so run Composer locally and upload vendor/.

The short version

The free tier doesn’t include SSH or a shell, so you can’t run composer install on the server. The standard approach is to run Composer on your local machine and upload the resulting vendor/ directory along with your code.

Local workflow

  1. Install Composer locally from getcomposer.org.
  2. In your project folder run composer install. This creates a vendor/ directory with the libraries you depend on and an autoloader.
  3. Upload your project to the hosting panel’s File Manager, including the vendor/ directory.
  4. Require the autoloader at the top of your PHP files: require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

Speed up large uploads

The vendor/ tree can be thousands of small files. Two practical tricks:

  • Zip and upload: compress vendor/ locally into a single archive, upload, then use the file manager’s Extract action. This avoids per-file overhead.
  • SFTP / FTP: use a client like FileZilla or Cyberduck. Set the concurrent transfer limit higher so the small files go up in parallel.

Lock the production build

Run this locally before zipping:

composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
  • --no-dev skips dev-only packages (PHPUnit, etc.).
  • --optimize-autoloader generates a static class map so autoloads are faster than on-disk scanning.

Keep vendor out of the document root if you can

The conventional layout puts public_html alongside vendor/ rather than inside it:

your-app/
├── public_html/   ← document root
│   └── index.php  (uses ../vendor/autoload.php)
├── src/
├── vendor/
└── composer.json

If your account forces everything under public_html/, add an .htaccess inside the vendor/ folder with:

Require all denied

Updating versions

Edit composer.json on your local machine, run composer update there, and re-upload the new vendor/. Always commit composer.lock alongside composer.json so your deployments are reproducible.