allegro

Allegro — Fast, Disk-Efficient PHP Package Linker

Allegro is a fast, disk-efficient alternative to composer install. It uses a content-addressable store (CAS) to deduplicate PHP packages across projects and links them into vendor/ via reflink, hardlink, or copy.

Allegro is not a Composer replacement — it's a Composer accelerator. Composer handles dependency resolution; Allegro handles the file I/O.

Why Allegro?

Quick Start

# Install via Go
go install github.com/allegro-php/allegro/cmd/allegro@latest

# Or build from source
go build -o allegro ./cmd/allegro
# Install dependencies (reads composer.lock, downloads via CAS, links into vendor/)
allegro install

# No lock file? Allegro generates one via Composer automatically
allegro install

# Add a package (delegates resolution to Composer, installs via CAS)
allegro require guzzlehttp/guzzle ^7.0

# Update all dependencies
allegro update

# Production deploy (lock file must exist, no dev deps, no scripts)
allegro install --frozen-lockfile --no-dev --no-scripts

Benchmark

Speed

Measured on Apple M-series (macOS, APFS). Run ./benchmark/run.sh to reproduce.

Cold installs are network-bound so both tools perform similarly. The real advantage is on subsequent installs: Allegro skips downloads entirely and links from the local CAS.

Disk Savings

With hardlinks, multiple projects sharing the same dependencies use a single copy on disk. Run ./benchmark/disk-savings.sh to reproduce.

The CAS stores each file once by SHA-256 hash. Every project's vendor/ hardlinks to the same inodes — no duplication.

allegro install
  1. Read composer.lock (or generate it via Composer if absent)
  2. Check which packages are already in CAS — skip those
  3. Download missing packages in parallel (8 workers default)
  4. Extract and store in CAS (~/.allegro/store/) by SHA-256 hash
  5. Link into vendor/ via reflink → hardlink → copy fallback
  6. Run composer dumpautoload --optimize
  7. Run Composer scripts (post-install-cmd)
  8. Register project for smart store pruning

Commands

Flags

Configuration

Precedence: CLI flag > environment variable > config file > default

Config file location: ~/.allegro/config.json (created via allegro config set)

Store Layout

~/.allegro/
  allegro.json                 # store metadata (version)
  config.json                  # user configuration (optional)
  projects.json                # project registry (for smart prune)
  store/
    files/ab/abcdef1234...     # content-addressed files (SHA-256)
    packages/vendor/pkg/1.0.json  # package manifests
    tmp/                       # extraction staging (cleaned automatically)

Requirements

• Go 1.23+ for building
• Composer >= 2.0 at runtime (for dependency resolution and autoload generation)
• PHP (required by Composer)

Building

go build -ldflags "-s -w \
  -X main.version=$(git describe --tags --always) \
  -X main.commit=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) \
  -X main.buildDate=$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)" \
  -o allegro ./cmd/allegro

Cross-compilation targets: darwin/amd64, darwin/arm64, linux/amd64, linux/arm64, windows/amd64.

Running Tests

go test ./...              # all tests
go test -race ./...        # with race detector
go test -v ./qa/...        # QA test suite (92 tests)

Tested With

Allegro is QA-tested against real-world projects spanning the PHP ecosystem. Every install is verified for file integrity (hash + permissions) and autoloader correctness.

Total: 2,905 packages, 236K files — all verified, zero failures.

Architecture

License

See LICENSE.