Mapping home controller as the default controller in AltoRouter

This is the index.php

<?php
include 'library/altorouter.php';

$router = new AltoRouter();
$router->setBasePath('/AltoRouter'); 

$router->map('GET','/', 'home_controller#index', 'home');
$router->map('GET','/content/[:parent]/?[:child]?', 'content_controller#display_item', 'content');

$match = $router->match();

// not sure if code after this comment  is the best way to handle matched routes
list( $controller, $action ) = explode( '#', $match['target'] );

if ( is_callable(array($controller, $action)) ) {

    $obj = new $controller();

     var_dump($obj);

    call_user_func_array(array($obj,$action), array($match['params']));

} else if ($match['target']==''){
    echo 'Error: no route was matched'; 

} else {
    echo 'Error: can not call '.$controller.'#'.$action; 

}

// content_controller class file is autoloaded 

class home_controller {
    public function index() {
        echo 'hi from home';
    }
}

and it works good. The home_controller class is supposed to be the default controller.

Problem is, when I remove the class home_controller

class home_controller {
    public function index() {
        echo 'hi from home';
    }
}

and save it as a seprate file home_controller.php in app/controller directroy it does not work.

I understand that the router is unable to locate the home_controller class hence will not show it's content (if i directly include the file home_controller.php it again works as normal).

My question is, how do you map the home_controller as default, which is in a different directory?

It looks like you're not using composer for installing the package. It's standard way in PHP.

1. Install Composer

• Here is manual, depending on your OS

2. Call Composer from Command Line

Go to your root directory of your project, open Command Line and type:

composer require altorouter/altorouter

You'll find the package name altorouter/altorouter in composer.json on Github page of package - here.

3. Add loaded files to your index.php

Now you have installed router package. Next step is adding all composer loaded files to your application. Just replace include 'library/altorouter.php'; with following:

<?php

# index.php

require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

4. Load Your Controllers by Composer as well

Last step is tell composer where to find your classes.

Open composer.json and add following section:

{
    "autolaod": {
        "classmap": ["app"]
    }
}

Read more about classmap option in documentation.

To update /vendor/autoload.php with this option, just call from command line:

 composer dump-autoload

That should be it. If you come at any troubles, let me know which point.