Minimum Stability

The PHP package manager Composer has a very cool feature called minimum stability. It defines the minimum stability of wildcard versions.

Let’s say you define the following in your composer.json file:

“symfony/finder” : “2.2.*”

By default, the minimum stability is “stable”. That means the package manager will look for the newest version in the “2.2.” branch which is stable. If you are looking for the newest dev version you can redefine the minimum stability for this package to:

“symfony/finder” : “2.2.*@dev”

In that case you would get the newest development and unstable version of the “2.2.” branch. Possible stability tags are “@dev”, “@RC”, “@stable”, “@beta” and “@alpha”.

VersionEye now understands the minimum stability tags Composer uses and can handle them. But it is an early implementation. Your feedback is highly welcome!