Use github fork as composer dependency

I struggled recently to use a GitHub branch on a fork as a Composer dependency. Here is how I fixed it.

Last month I created a Pull Request to add a feature to the wonderful deployer project. I am a big fan of Deployer and I built a deployment tool out of it for my company, that is why I wanted to participate to the project. After coding the feature, I wanted to check that it would not break my tool.

My tool uses deployer/deployer as a composer dependency. To make sure it would still work with my feature, I needed to build my tool dependency with my branch from my fork https://github.com/matks/deployer instead of the official repository.

So basically my usecase was “how to use a GitHub branch as a Composer dependency”

Great news ! There is a blog article with this name: “Use a GitHub Branch as a Composer Dependency” and it is well written. So I follow the steps:

This is my initial composer.json

{
    "name": "XXX",
    "license": "proprietary",
    "type": "project",
    "minimum-stability": "stable",
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.4.0",
        "deployer/deployer": "~3.0.0",
        "deployphp/recipes": "~3.0"
    },
    "require-dev": {},
    "autoload": {},
    "config": {
      "bin-dir": "bin"
    }
}

{
    "name": "XXX",
    "license": "proprietary",
    "type": "project",
    "minimum-stability": "stable",
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.4.0",
        "matks/deployer": "dev-enable-autocomplete-questions",
        "deployphp/recipes": "~3.0"
    },
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "git",
            "url": "https://github.com/matks/deployer"
        }
    ],
    "require-dev": {},
    "autoload": {},
    "config": {
      "bin-dir": "bin"
    }
}

I delete the composer.lock as I want a new one, and I run composer install.

BOUM !

Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.

  Problem 1
    - The requested package matks/deployer could not be found in any version, there may be a typo in the package name.

Potential causes:
 - A typo in the package name
 - The package is not available in a stable-enough version according to your minimum-stability setting
   see <https://getcomposer.org/doc/04-schema.md#minimum-stability> for more details.

Composer cannot build my set of requirements and I don’t understand why.

So I read again the tutorial and I double-check everything. I try a few tricks (for example to change my ‘minimum-stability’ to ‘stable’) … nothing. It seems I cannot build my tool using my fork as a repository. Composer says it cannot find my package matks/deployer although the Github page https://github.com/matks/deployer is online.

Then I get it.

Github knows there is 2 projects: matks/deployer and deployer/deployer, each of them is a git repository. But Composer does not look for Github repository names. Composer looks for the project name in the composer.json file ! Adding the repositories element in my composer.json told Composer to look in this Github repository for a composer.json file in which it would find the package dependency. And since I forked the main repository in order to create a Pull Request, I did not change the project name. So my Github repository is matks/deployer but my Composer project name is still deployer/deployer.

Let’s fix this !

So this is my final composer.json:

{
    "name": "XXX",
    "license": "proprietary",
    "type": "project",
    "minimum-stability": "stable",
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.4.0",
        "deployer/deployer": "dev-enable-autocomplete-questions",
        "deployphp/recipes": "~3.0"
    },
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "git",
            "url": "https://github.com/matks/deployer"
        }
    ],
    "require-dev": {},
    "autoload": {},
    "config": {
      "bin-dir": "bin"
    }
}

And this one works, Composer performs the installation using, as expected, my development branch.

Because of how we use them often together, it is easy to be confused between Github, Packagist, Composer, repositories. This is what happened to me, I confused a Github property for a Composer property, and I did not configure my composer.json properly.

I hope this blog post will help you not to do this mistake.

And thanks @lornajane for the wonderful “Use a GitHub Branch as a Composer Dependency” blog post.