Command-line interface#

You've already learned how to use the command-line interface to do some things. This chapter documents all the available commands.

To get help from the command-line, simply call composer or composer list to see the complete list of commands, then --help combined with any of those can give you more information.

Global Options#

The following options are available with every command:

Process Exit Codes#

init#

In the Libraries chapter we looked at how to create a composer.json by hand. There is also an init command available that makes it a bit easier to do this.

When you run the command it will interactively ask you to fill in the fields, while using some smart defaults.

$ php composer.phar init

Options

install#

The install command reads the composer.json file from the current directory, resolves the dependencies, and installs them into vendor.

$ php composer.phar install

If there is a composer.lock file in the current directory, it will use the exact versions from there instead of resolving them. This ensures that everyone using the library will get the same versions of the dependencies.

If there is no composer.lock file, composer will create one after dependency resolution.

Options

update#

In order to get the latest versions of the dependencies and to update the composer.lock file, you should use the update command.

$ php composer.phar update

This will resolve all dependencies of the project and write the exact versions into composer.lock.

If you just want to update a few packages and not all, you can list them as such:

$ php composer.phar update vendor/package vendor/package2

You can also use wildcards to update a bunch of packages at once:

$ php composer.phar update vendor/*

Options

require#

The require command adds new packages to the composer.json file from the current directory.

$ php composer.phar require

After adding/changing the requirements, the modified requirements will be installed or updated.

If you do not want to choose requirements interactively, you can just pass them to the command.

$ php composer.phar require vendor/package:2.* vendor/package2:dev-master

Options

The search command allows you to search through the current project's package repositories. Usually this will be just packagist. You simply pass it the terms you want to search for.

$ php composer.phar search monolog

You can also search for more than one term by passing multiple arguments.

Options

show#

To list all of the available packages, you can use the show command.

$ php composer.phar show

If you want to see the details of a certain package, you can pass the package name.

$ php composer.phar show monolog/monolog

name     : monolog/monolog
versions : master-dev, 1.0.2, 1.0.1, 1.0.0, 1.0.0-RC1
type     : library
names    : monolog/monolog
source   : [git] http://github.com/Seldaek/monolog.git 3d4e60d0cbc4b888fe5ad223d77964428b1978da
dist     : [zip] http://github.com/Seldaek/monolog/zipball/3d4e60d0cbc4b888fe5ad223d77964428b1978da 3d4e60d0cbc4b888fe5ad223d77964428b1978da
license  : MIT

autoload
psr-0
Monolog : src/

requires
php >=5.3.0

You can even pass the package version, which will tell you the details of that specific version.

$ php composer.phar show monolog/monolog 1.0.2

Options

depends#

The depends command tells you which other packages depend on a certain package. You can specify which link types (require, require-dev) should be included in the listing. By default both are used.

$ php composer.phar depends --link-type=require monolog/monolog

nrk/monolog-fluent
poc/poc
propel/propel
symfony/monolog-bridge
symfony/symfony

Options

validate#

You should always run the validate command before you commit your composer.json file, and before you tag a release. It will check if your composer.json is valid.

$ php composer.phar validate

status#

If you often need to modify the code of your dependencies and they are installed from source, the status command allows you to check if you have local changes in any of them.

$ php composer.phar status

With the --verbose option you get some more information about what was changed:

$ php composer.phar status -v
You have changes in the following dependencies:
vendor/seld/jsonlint:
    M README.mdown

self-update#

To update composer itself to the latest version, just run the self-update command. It will replace your composer.phar with the latest version.

$ php composer.phar self-update

If you have installed composer for your entire system (see global installation), you have to run the command with root privileges

$ sudo composer self-update

config#

The config command allows you to edit some basic composer settings in either the local composer.json file or the global config.json file.

$ php composer.phar config --list

Usage#

config [options] [setting-key] [setting-value1] ... [setting-valueN]

setting-key is a configuration option name and setting-value1 is a configuration value. For settings that can take an array of values (like github-protocols), more than one setting-value arguments are allowed.

See the config schema section for valid configuration options.

Options

Modifying Repositories#

In addition to modifying the config section, the config command also supports making changes to the repositories section by using it the following way:

$ php composer.phar config repositories.foo vcs http://github.com/foo/bar

create-project#

You can use Composer to create new projects from an existing package. This is the equivalent of doing a git clone/svn checkout followed by a composer install of the vendors.

There are several applications for this:

  1. You can deploy application packages.
  2. You can check out any package and start developing on patches for example.
  3. Projects with multiple developers can use this feature to bootstrap the initial application for development.

To create a new project using composer you can use the "create-project" command. Pass it a package name, and the directory to create the project in. You can also provide a version as third argument, otherwise the latest version is used.

If the directory does not currently exist, it will be created during installation.

php composer.phar create-project doctrine/orm path 2.2.0

By default the command checks for the packages on packagist.org.

Options

dump-autoload#

If you need to update the autoloader because of new classes in a classmap package for example, you can use "dump-autoload" to do that without having to go through an install or update.

Additionally, it can dump an optimized autoloader that converts PSR-0 packages into classmap ones for performance reasons. In large applications with many classes, the autoloader can take up a substantial portion of every request's time. Using classmaps for everything is less convenient in development, but using this option you can still use PSR-0 for convenience and classmaps for performance.

Options

run-script#

To run scripts manually you can use this command, just give it the script name and optionally --no-dev to disable the dev mode.

diagnose#

If you think you found a bug, or something is behaving strangely, you might want to run the diagnose command to perform automated checks for many common problems.

$ php composer.phar diagnose

help#

To get more information about a certain command, just use help.

$ php composer.phar help install

Environment variables#

You can set a number of environment variables that override certain settings. Whenever possible it is recommended to specify these settings in the config section of composer.json instead. It is worth noting that that the env vars will always take precedence over the values specified in composer.json.

COMPOSER#

By setting the COMPOSER env variable it is possible to set the filename of composer.json to something else.

For example:

$ COMPOSER=composer-other.json php composer.phar install

COMPOSER_ROOT_VERSION#

By setting this var you can specify the version of the root package, if it can not be guessed from VCS info and is not present in composer.json.

COMPOSER_VENDOR_DIR#

By setting this var you can make composer install the dependencies into a directory other than vendor.

COMPOSER_BIN_DIR#

By setting this option you can change the bin (Vendor Binaries) directory to something other than vendor/bin.

http_proxy or HTTP_PROXY#

If you are using composer from behind an HTTP proxy, you can use the standard http_proxy or HTTP_PROXY env vars. Simply set it to the URL of your proxy. Many operating systems already set this variable for you.

Using http_proxy (lowercased) or even defining both might be preferable since some tools like git or curl will only use the lower-cased http_proxy version. Alternatively you can also define the git proxy using git config --global http.proxy <proxy url>.

HTTP_PROXY_REQUEST_FULLURI#

If you use a proxy but it does not support the request_fulluri flag, then you should set this env var to false or 0 to prevent composer from setting the request_fulluri option.

COMPOSER_HOME#

The COMPOSER_HOME var allows you to change the composer home directory. This is a hidden, global (per-user on the machine) directory that is shared between all projects.

By default it points to /home/<user>/.composer on *nix, /Users/<user>/.composer on OSX and C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Composer on Windows.

COMPOSER_HOME/config.json#

You may put a config.json file into the location which COMPOSER_HOME points to. Composer will merge this configuration with your project's composer.json when you run the install and update commands.

This file allows you to set configuration and repositories for the user's projects.

In case global configuration matches local configuration, the local configuration in the project's composer.json always wins.

COMPOSER_PROCESS_TIMEOUT#

This env var controls the time composer waits for commands (such as git commands) to finish executing. The default value is 300 seconds (5 minutes).

COMPOSER_DISCARD_CHANGES#

This env var controls the discard-changes config option.

COMPOSER_NO_INTERACTION#

If set to 1, this env var will make composer behave as if you passed the --no-interaction flag to every command. This can be set on build boxes/CI.

← Libraries | Schema →

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