Path issues using composer for Commerce install on shared hosting On a shared server with Composer installed the template for installing Drupal 8 or Drupal commerce creates a project directory and puts the site in a web directory within the project.

On a shared host with a structure like:

/var/www/example.com

with home private tmp ssl web

How do you use composer to install 3 or more Dupal sites like this?

example.com
example.com/mystore 
example.com/dev

If you run the composer install from the web directory /var/www/example.com/web the install paths are:

example.com/projectname/web
example.com/mystore/web 
example.com/dev/web

and projectname, mystore and dev are not a protected directory.

Running composer from /var/www/example.com does not work
Went back and installed the drupal 8 tar.gz (without composer or drush) for the 3 directories I wanted and ran composer from each directory to update and then installed commerce.

After installing the tar.gz 

ran: composer config repositories.drupal composer https://packages.drupal.org/8

then: composer require "drupal/commerce 2.x-dev"