Programming Tutorials

  In legacy PHP ecosystems, the most common architectural debt is the "Include Chain." You open   index.php   or   config.php   and find dozens of   require_once   statements. As the application grows, developers lose track of the dependency graph. Files are included "just in case," or worse, you encounter the "White Screen of Death" because   User.php   was included before   Database.php , but   User   extends a class defined in   Database . This manual dependency management turns refactoring into a high-risk game of Jenga. It makes unit testing nearly impossible because dependencies are hard-coded into the global scope rather than injected. This guide details the technical migration from manual  require  chains to industry-standard PSR-4 autoloading using Composer. The Root Cause: Why Manual Includes Fail Under the hood,  require  and  include  are procedural instructions to the PHP interpre...