composer/doc/articles/troubleshooting.md

Troubleshooting

This is a list of common pitfalls on using Composer, and how to avoid them.

General

1. When facing any kind of problems using Composer, be sure to work with the latest version. See self-update for details.

2. Make sure you have no problems with your setup by running the installer's checks via curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --check.

3. Ensure you're installing vendors straight from your composer.json via rm -rf vendor && composer update -v when troubleshooting, excluding any possible interferences with existing vendor installations or composer.lock entries.

Package not found

1. Double-check you don't have typos in your composer.json or repository branches and tag names.

2. Be sure to set the right minimum-stability. To get started or be sure this is no issue, set minimum-stability to "dev".

3. Packages not coming from Packagist should always be defined in the root package (the package depending on all vendors).

4. Use the same vendor and package name throughout all branches and tags of your repository, especially when maintaining a third party fork and using replace.

Memory limit errors

If composer shows memory errors on some commands:

PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of XXXXXX bytes exhausted <...>

The PHP memory_limit should be increased.

Note: Composer internally increases the memory_limit to 512M. If you have memory issues when using composer, please consider creating an issue ticket so we can look into it.

To get the current memory_limit value, run:

php -r "echo ini_get('memory_limit').PHP_EOL;"

Try increasing the limit in your php.ini file (ex. /etc/php5/cli/php.ini for Debian-like systems):

; Use -1 for unlimited or define an explicit value like 512M
memory_limit = -1

Or, you can increase the limit with a command-line argument:

php -d memory_limit=-1 composer.phar <...>