[mschuster91]

> composer is mainly used on the development side to maintain dependencies.

Well you will also need composer for actual deployment.

> . It really shouldn't be a problem to have ssh/a working internet connection on your development box.

Ever worked at a BigCo where everything is firewalled and needs a proxy? Or no internet at all and you gonna transfer stuff via USB sticks?

[krapp]

>Well you will also need composer for actual deployment.

No you don't, it's PHP, there is no "actual deployment" beyond putting the files on a server.

Worst case scenario (because I've had to do this) is you have to change the paths in the file generated by the autoloader, if your development environment is different than production. But that's no more work than adding paths to include statements. You can even just do that locally first and move everything with FTP.

[debaserab2]

No, you don't need it for deployment at all - a very common and sane deployment strategy is to have one developer / staging environment that does composer install/updating, and then the result of that build is rsync'd (or it could be FTP'd over in a shared hosting environment) to the production host(s).