Magento – Recommended way to Install Magento 2 on shared hosting, Composer or archives

Quoted from https://alankent.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/magento-2-progress-towards-installation-via-composer/:

What is packages.magento.com? This is a Satis repository of the Magento 2 packages. This might change around by final release, but it gets the packages out there for now without polluting packagist.org with our weekly alpha code drops. Note that the root package listing all the modules that make up community edition is currently on packagist.org at https://packagist.org/packages/magento/product-community-edition. We are still experimenting with where best to host everything.

If you download the zip from magento.com you shouldn't have to run composer install again. You should already have the vendor directory with all the required dependencies. Just go to yourhost/setup and install Magento or install via CLI. Do check for suggested file permissions and users as in documentation.

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If you are a contributing developer (making Pull Requests to the code base) you would use magento from git. If you are using shared hosting, use the downloaded zip. if you are a SI/extension dev use composer create-project The differences for each of these approaches and more are explained here: devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/install-gde/continue.html If you are talking about saving an instance of your entire store, assuming you have other modules, it would be better to use the composer create-project and just checking in composer.json and composer.lock and other custom files.