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Comparing to other package managers like npm, I find that composer has a strange behaviour when updating packages related to a given project.

According also to the documentation, update and upgrade options

Upgrades your dependencies to the latest version according to composer.json, and updates the composer.lock file.

And indeed, composer.lock is correctly updated with new packages version numbers. But composer.json instead is not modified, and lists packages with their old, outdated version numbers.

Why does this happen? Am I doing something wrong, or this is indeed how this is supposed to work? And if this is the case, what is the reasoning behind having one of thw two files up-to-date while the other is not?

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  • fyi, npm uses package-lock.json Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 12:32
  • @kerbholz yes, I know, but package.json is updated as well when updating packages. Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 12:33
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    Are you expecting the versions specified in composer.json to be updated to the latest version when you run composer update? If I've specified that I want version 2.1.1 of a package, I don't want this to be changed when version 2.1.2 comes, if I did I would have written 2.1.* or just * Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 12:42
  • My composer.json has "package": "^4.2" that was automatically added by composer require, if I run composer update the package is updated from version 4.2.0 to 4.3.0 and composer.lock is updated to this new version, but composer.json still lists 4.2. My question is about this difference. Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 12:54
  • Maybe stackoverflow.com/questions/16739998/… answers your question Commented Oct 12, 2020 at 12:05

1 Answer 1

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That's the normal behavior.

Composer update looks for updates based on your composer.json file, so here it will look for 4.2 and above (^4.2) If you want your composer.json to require 4.3 and above (^4.3), you can either modify it manually or call composer require once again.

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