Put this in your bash profile and run source ~/.bashrc
alias composer="/opt/cpanel/ea-php71/root/usr/bin/php /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer"
As Composer is now available via WHM you can use this to find it:
which composer
This returned path “/opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer” for me. If this returns nothing then disregard the rest of this answer, as Composer is not available to you at system level.
You can now use php-cli to call this with Composer’s absolute path:
php-cli /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer install
php-cli /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer update
php-cli /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer require whatever/example
You may however need to alias php-cli if your system claims this isn’t found. It very much depends how PHP has been deployed on the WHM server. Learn how to fix PHP CLI error. You can do this by adding a user alias to the end of your “.bashrc” or “.bash_profile” file as follows:
alias php-cli=/opt/cpanel/ea-php72/root/usr/bin/php
Replace ea-php72 with the release of PHP you want to use. Submit this as a command in the shell to make it available immediately, otherwise it’ll become available when you open your next Bash session.
If you want to make this available with just composer alone you could create this alias again in “.bashrc”:
alias composer=/opt/cpanel/ea-php72/root/usr/bin/php /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer
Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53478183/2229148