In Magento2 RC, does every module and theme need to be pulled via composer?

Question

I added registration.php to my custom (project specific) modules and themes. But those files do not end up in vendor/composer/autoload_files.php after composer.phar dumpautoload - so the modules are not registered.

How can I make my code in app/code and app/design known to Magento and/or composer to load the registration.php ?

Answer 1

Not sure if this applies anymore, but I added registration.php for my module (a few minor versions ago), ran php bin/magento setup:upgrade and my module was recognized without touching composer.

[EDIT]
I just tested this on the latest available version (rc) and it works the same.
I add the registration.php file for modules:

\Magento\Framework\Component\ComponentRegistrar::register(
    \Magento\Framework\Component\ComponentRegistrar::MODULE,
    '[Namespace]_[Module]',
    __DIR__
);

and run setup:upgrade and the module is recognized.

For theme I added registration.php:

\Magento\Framework\Component\ComponentRegistrar::register(
    \Magento\Framework\Component\ComponentRegistrar::THEME,
    'frontend/[Namespace]/[theme]',
    __DIR__
);

added theme.xml

<theme xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="urn:magento:framework:Config/etc/theme.xsd">
    <title>[Title here]</title>
    <parent>Magento/blank</parent>
    <media>
        <preview_image>media/preview.jpg</preview_image>
    </media>
</theme>

created the media/previw.jpg, cleared the cache and everything works without touching composer.

Answer 2

registration.php files of non-composer packages are handled by the file

app/etc/NonComposerComponentRegistration.php

This is included here: https://github.com/magento/magento2/blob/22629abe10f9c640fe47b6081d57fedccdea8e0f/composer.json

But it is not included in the product-base repo: https://github.com/magento/magento2-community-edition/blob/master/composer.json nor in https://packages.magento.com/_packages/magento_product-community-edition-2.0.0-rc.zip

So this looks like a bug to me which can be fixed by adding

"autoload": {
    "files": [
        "app/etc/NonComposerComponentRegistration.php"
    ]
},

to your composer.json

Answer 3

For me, this worked: delete all files in the pub/static/frontend and var/view_preprocessed directories, then reload the pages