WordPress Packagist VS Spout

Use it together with https://wpackagist.org/ and you can update all plugins/themes by latest or by version number.

Another option you can look at is Bedrock by Roots - that is sets WP as an app with composer already set up. It allows you to install WP plugins (from official WP repo) via composer (WP Packagist). The structure is set up to allow for git workflow. Also helpful if you want to make use of a bunch of composer packages on your site.

https://wpackagist.org/ in the example you see "repositories", now in that array you can put your plugins github-link and set the other settings. with composer install you install them and with composer update you update them

Side question: I know that the WordPress ecosystem has been moving toward better support for Composer – e.g., with WPackagist. But wouldn't plugins installed/updated via Composer run into the same issue?

We were testing PHP Spreadsheet and Spout (https://github.com/box/spout). We chose Spout because of its low memory footprint. It is using streams so it is much lighter than PHP Spreadsheet, although it is missing quite a bit of features that PHP Spreadsheet has.

The Simple Excel package uses the box/spout package under the hood. In the readme it states that you can get to the underlying writer using ->getWriter().

box/spout: Read and write spreadsheet files (CSV, XLSX and ODS), in a fast and scalable way

If you don't have a lot of formatting requirements beyond just the placement of the data in the correct fields, I really enjoy Box/Spout (https://opensource.box.com/spout/), and they have a way to install it without composer.

I've also had good experiences with https://github.com/box/spout

to add to this, this library is really good when wanting to parse CSV files https://github.com/box/spout