PHP Composer - set vendor directory

I'm having trouble configuring the vendor path for a Yii2 application. I am adding a couple of lines to the composer.json file I get from the Yii2 basic app template. All I want to do is change the location of my vendor assets.

Below are the changes I have made to the files but I get this error:

The file or directory to be published does not exist: /path/to/app/vendor/bower/jquery/dist

But I'm expecting that particular asset to be published to:

/path/to/vendors/bower/jquery/dist

No matter what I do, I still get that error message. I suspect it's a Yii2 issue and not a composer issue but I'm not sure. Anyone got any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Files...

index.php

// comment out the following two lines when deployed to production
defined('YII_DEBUG') or define('YII_DEBUG', true);
defined('YII_ENV') or define('YII_ENV', 'dev');

require('/path/to/vendors/autoload.php');
require('/path/to/vendors/yiisoft/yii2/Yii.php');

$config = require(__DIR__ . '/../config/web.php');

(new yii\web\Application($config))->run();

composer.json

{
    "name": "yiisoft/yii2-app-basic",
    "description": "Yii 2 Basic Project Template",
    "keywords": ["yii2", "framework", "basic", "project template"],
    "homepage": "http://www.yiiframework.com/",
    "type": "project",
    "license": "BSD-3-Clause",
    "support": {
        ...
    },
    "minimum-stability": "dev",
    "config": {
        "process-timeout": 1800,
        "vendor-dir": "/path/to/vendors"
    },
    "require": {
        "fxp/composer-asset-plugin": "~1.0",
        ...
    },
    "extra": {
        "asset-installer-paths": {
            "npm-asset-library": "../../includes/vendors/npm",
            "bower-asset-library": "../../includes/vendors/bower"
        }
    }
}

Solution

Turns out there's a there's a simple solution: If you want to change the location of your vendor assets then you must follow these simple steps:

include the composer-asset-plugin in your composer.json file
```
"require": {
    "fxp/composer-asset-plugin": "*"
}
```

include the composer-asset-plugin directive in your extra config. in your composer.json file:

"extra": {
"asset-installer-paths": {
        "npm-asset-library": "../../path/to/vendors/npm",
        "bower-asset-library": "../../path/to/vendors/bower"
    }
}

add the vendor location to the config section in your composer.json file:
```
"config": {
    "vendor-dir": "../../path/to/vendors"
}
```

update web/index.php to point to the new vendor location:

require(__DIR__ . '/../../../path/to/vendors/autoload.php');
require(__DIR__ . '/../../../path/to/vendors/yiisoft/yii2/Yii.php');

include a vendorPath definition in your config/web.php:
```
'vendorPath' => '../../../path/to/vendors',
```

That should work with the vanilla Yii2 basic template.