This is a list of common pitfalls on using Composer, and how to avoid them.
Before asking anyone, run composer diagnose
to check
for common problems. If it all checks out, proceed to the next steps.
When facing any kind of problems using Composer, be sure to work with the latest version. See self-update for details.
Make sure you have no problems with your setup by running the installer's
checks via curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --check
.
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.
Double-check you don't have typos in your composer.json
or repository
branches and tag names.
Be sure to set the right
minimum-stability. To get started or be
sure this is no issue, set minimum-stability
to "dev".
Packages not coming from Packagist should always be defined in the root package (the package depending on all vendors).
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
.
Check the "Package not found" item above.
If the package tested is a dependency of one of its dependencies (cyclic
dependency), the problem might be that composer is not able to detect the version
of the package properly. If it is a git clone it is generally alright and Composer
will detect the version of the current branch, but travis does shallow clones so
that process can fail when testing pull requests and feature branches in general.
The best solution is to define the version you are on via an environment variable
called COMPOSER_ROOT_VERSION. You set it to dev-master
for example to define
the root package's version as dev-master
.
Use: before_script: COMPOSER_ROOT_VERSION=dev-master composer install
to export
the variable for the call to composer.
Let say your project depends on package A which in turn depends on a specific version of package B (say 0.1) and you need a different version of that package - version 0.11.
You can fix this by aliasing version 0.11 to 0.1:
composer.json:
{
"require": {
"A": "0.2",
"B": "0.11 as 0.1"
}
}
See aliases for more information.
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
to512M
. 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 <...>
AutoRun
key inside HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor
or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor
.Because of GitHub's rate limits on their API it can happen that Composer prompts for authentication asking your username and password so it can go ahead with its work. Unfortunately this will not work if you enabled two factor authentication on your GitHub account and to solve this issue you need to:
Add it to the configuration running composer config -g github-oauth.github.com <oauthtoken>
Now Composer should install/update without asking for authentication.