Composer Dry Run

Aug 22, 2017 1 min read #composer #php

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Just another case of RTFM I’m sure, but I was wondering how to preview the changes that will happen if I do a composer update on my current project. I wanted to get an idea of how many libraries would change so I could see if it would be a short or long project (potentially) to do a 3rd Party Library update. (I already hear you - and I agree - the number of files changing isn’t always indicative of how long the task to update your project’s dependencies will take. Shhh - quiet you.)

Well, the command you’re looking for is dry run:

composer update --dry-run

bash

This will do all the calculations and show you what would have happened. (Bonus is that I believe it caches the calculation as well - so when you actually go do to it - it should be much faster.)