Sometimes Magento is a pain to work with, especially when it’s installed in a local development environment. Even using a virtualisation with vagrant, most machines can’t match the performance of a web server. If you keep getting errors in the Magento Connect Manager, and your not quite ready for composer to install dependencies then you may want to install an extension manually.

If your extension is large and complex, it can be tedious to manually add all the files, dragging and dropping and making sure all the files from the downloaded extension are correctly placed in your development file structure.

I use rsync to do this for me, it’s a way to copy all the files from the downloaded extension and merge them into your Magento installation, in just one line of code in the terminal. Here it is;

rsync -aP /path/to/downloaded/extension/* /path/to/magento/installation/

This will make your life a bit easier and with the extra time, you can figure out how to get composer playing with Magento, which I will cover in a future post.