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All you need to know about Composer

All composer commands, depending on your install, may need to use php composer.phar in the install folder for composer, instead of plain composer.

Updating packages

This command changes only the composer.lock file.

composer update	Updates all packages
composer update --with-dependencies	Updates all packages and its dependencies
composer update vendor/package	Updates a certain package from vendor
composer update vendor/*	Updates all packages from vendor
composer update --lock	Updates composer.lock hash without updating any packages

Adding packages

This command changes both the composer.json and composer.lock files.

composer require vendor/package.	Adds package from vendor to composer.json’s require section and installs it
composer require vendor/package --dev	Adds package from vendor to composer.json’s require-dev section and installs it.

Removing packages

This command changes both the composer.json and composer.lock files.

composer remove vendor/package

Removes vendor/package from composer.json and uninstalls it

Installing dependencies

This command doesn’t change any file. If composer.lock is not present, it will create it.

composer.lock should always be committed to the repository. It has all the information needed to bring the local dependencies to the last committed state. If that file is modified on the repository, you will need to run composer install again after fetching the changes to update your local dependencies to those on that file.

composer install	Downloads and installs all the libraries and dependencies outlined in the composer.lock file. If the file does not exist it will look for composer.json and do the same, creating a composer.lock file.
composer install --dry-run	Simulates the install without installing anything

Updating autoloader

composer dumpautoload -o

Generates optimized autoload files

Passing versions

composer require vendor/pkg "1.3.2"	Installs 1.3.2
composer require vendor/pkg ">=1.3.2"	Above or equal 1.3.2
composer require vendor/pkg "<1.3.2"	Below 1.3.2
composer require vendor/pkg "1.3.*"	Latest of >=1.3.0 <1.4.0
composer require vendor/pkg "~1.3.2"	Latest of >=1.3.2 <1.4.0
composer require vendor/pkg "~1.3"	Latest of >=1.3.0 <2.0.0
composer require vendor/pkg "^1.3.2"	Latest of >=1.3.2 <2.0.0
composer require vendor/pkg "^1.3"	Latest of >=1.3.0 <2.0.0
composer require vendor/pkg "^0.3.2"	Latest of >=0.3.0 <0.4.0 (for pre-1.0)
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