What are some best practices for managing dependencies in PHP projects using composer?

Managing dependencies in PHP projects using Composer involves defining and managing the required libraries and packages that your project relies on. Best practices include regularly updating dependencies, specifying exact version constraints in your composer.json file to prevent unexpected updates, and utilizing Composer's autoloading feature to efficiently manage class loading.

// Example composer.json file with version constraints
{
    "require": {
        "vendor/package": "1.0.*"
    }
}