Composer Stability Flags

Posted on Categories Continuous Updating

Composer has a cool feature, called stability flags. That allows you to specify the stability of a dependency.

minimum-stability

Assume there is no stable version of silex/silex. Then this entry

{
    "require": {
        "silex/silex": "1.0.*@dev"
    }
}

would install 1.0.x-dev, the dev version of the 1.0 branch.

I always interpreted “@dev” as “take the newest, even if it is unstable”. But currently I had this dependency in a composer.json:

"doctrine/migrations": "1.0.*@dev"

And Composer resolved that to “1.0.0-alpha3”. I do not really understand why. There is a stable version 1.0.0 and if “@dev” means “take the newest unstable version” then that would be 1.0.0-rc1.

If somebody can explain why “@dev” resolves to “1.0.0-alpha3” in this case please leave a comment here.

One thought on “Composer Stability Flags”

  1. I posted this question into the composer-dev IRC group and got an answer from Jordi, one of the core committers of the composer project. Usually 1.0.*@dev picks up the newest version. In this special case it would be 1.0.0. But version 1.0.0 requires PHP 5.4 and in the root composer.json PHP 5.3 is required, that’s why version 1.0.0 is not picked up. Same is true for version 1.0.0-rc2. The newest version which is compatible with PHP 5.3 is 1.0.0-alpha3. Makes sense. Now I understand it 🙂

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