Install Magento 1.x plugins using composer

I have had some issues understanding all the possible ways on installing a Magento plugin using composer. Search no more. It goes down to simple steps below:

Step 1. Setup your composer.json file (one time)

Create composer.json file in your Magento directory with the following contents:

{
    "require": {
        "colinmollenhour/modman": "^1.12",
        "magento-hackathon/magento-composer-installer": "^3.1"
    },
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "composer",
            "url": "https://packages.firegento.com"
        }
    ],
    "extra":{
        "magento-root-dir": "./",
        "auto-append-gitignore": false,
        "magento-deploystrategy": "copy",
        "magento-deploystrategy-dev": "symlink",
        "magento-force": true,
        "with-bootstrap-patch": false
    }
}

Step 2. Install a plugin

Let’s install Lesti FPC plugin for example. Run:

composer require --update-no-dev gordonlesti/lesti_fpc