Composer not loading from php include dir

I work at a University and we do a lot of similar developments for departments, research groups, etc. For us, it's easier to have a single vendor directory in an include path rather than duplicating the same set of packages for each individual development.

You can set a custom path to $config['composer_autoload'].
http://www.codeigniter.com/user_guide/ge...oader.html

To use that I'd need to specify a full path as just adding "vendor/autoload.php" fails the file_exists check in CodeIgniter.php.

I've just remembered, I can use a production directory in the config directory to override the differences between development and production environments.