Gitlab CI - Composer not found with ssh - ssh

Question

When connecting with ssh to my webserver I try to install composer dependencies after git pull. But the pipeline fails saying bash: composer: command not found. But there is definitely composer installed on the server.
I can also mount my docker image and try it directly with no problem!
Does anyone has an Idea why composer is not found?
Here the .gitlab-ci.yml:
stages:
- deploy
deploy_stage:
stage: deploy
image: parallactic/php-node:php8.0-node14.x
before_script:
- 'which ssh-agent || ( apt-get install -qq openssh-client )'
- eval $(ssh-agent -s)
- ssh-add <(echo "$SSH_PRIVATE_KEY" | base64 -d)
- mkdir -p ~/.ssh
- '[[ -f /.dockerenv ]] && echo -e "Host *\n\tStrictHostKeyChecking no\n\n" > ~/.ssh/config'
script:
- ssh ${DEPLOY_USER}#${DEPLOY_SERVER} "cd ${DEPLOY_DIR} && git pull origin main"
- ssh ${DEPLOY_USER}#${DEPLOY_SERVER} "cd ${DEPLOY_DIR} && composer install --no-interaction --prefer-dist --optimize-autoloader"
only:
- main
Thanks for any suggestions!

Answer 1

it may be that your DEPLOY_USER doesn't have composer in the PATH. you can check that with echo $PATH in this deploy script, and then manually connect with your user and compare the two.
but also you can specify full path to the composer (eg. /usr/local/bin/composer install ...)
btw, why separate ssh connections? you can do it in one line
ssh ${DEPLOY_USER}#${DEPLOY_SERVER} "cd ${DEPLOY_DIR} && git pull origin main && /usr/local/bin/composer install --no-interaction --prefer-dist --optimize-autoloader"