Hello 👋,

UPDATE: 10, Nov, 2020. Composer 2 is out and it is very fast compared to Composer 1, most if not all comparison done here can be ignored, I highy recommend switching to Composer v2 If you're using Linux use composer self-update --2 to update

So I was updating some Laravel application to version 8 and kept getting errors with the package and version constraints,

Using composer update

If a package is constrained with a Next Significant Release Operators like Tilde Version Range (~) or Caret Version Range (^)

Using composer update won't update to a MAJOR version. This requires a manual update.

Thus one has to know the next version to update to.

For more info check https://getcomposer.org/doc/articles/versions.md#next-significant-release-operators

Now, The Laravel Upgrade Guide shows the version of dependencies and first-party packages to update, for any other third-party packages consumed by your application one has to check and verify the latest version manually.

💡 Partial Solution

So checking the composer versioning constraints and I found a way to check the latest version of a package from here https://semver.mwl.be/

Now there are several third-party packages consumed in the project checking one after another seemed too manual

🤔 Quick question is, Where does the https://semver.mwl.be/ check for package information?

Well turn out there is a public packagist HTTP API documented here https://packagist.org/apidoc

So this means I can check the versions of the package directly from the terminal

🤔 Can't I archive this with composer

Well, you can use composer, for example composer show "monolog/monolog" will give you all the information about the package

I tried it and was not happy with the time taken to get the information.

Upon running composer show "monolog/monolog" -vvv --profile

I ended up with results like

...
...
[179.5MiB/42.39s] Memory usage: 179.49MiB (peak: 199.6MiB), time: 42.39s

Composer downloads several JSON files and reads to get that information required, Well, I just want to see the versions of a single package.

🏗 Solution implementation

Stage 1: Check the version of the single package

Using BASH scripting, I made a function to check the version of a package the function prints the latest 5 release tags of the package

Note: curl and jq are required.

function composer_check_package(){
        package=$1
        echo "Checking versions for package: $package"
        org="${package%/*}";
        pn="${package#*/}";
        curl -s echo "https://packagist.org/packages/$org/$pn.json" | jq -r '.package.versions | keys | .[-5:]';
        echo "";
}

Stage: Check versions for all packages in composer.json

This BASH script function checks for if composer.json exists then extracts then required packages and for each package, it checks and prints the latest version

function composer_check_all(){
[[ -e composer.json ]] && cat composer.json| jq -r '.require| keys | .[]' | while read package; do
        if [[ -z "php" ]]; then break; fi
        echo $package;
        org="${package%/*}";
        pn="${package#*/}";
        curl -s echo "https://packagist.org/packages/$org/$pn.json" | jq -r '.package.versions | keys | .[-5:]';
        echo "";
done

}

Other solution

Laravel Shift is automated, instant Laravel upgrade services by an army of thorough bots and friendly humans too. Laravel shift supports more functionalities listed below.

• Update versions
• Modernize code
• Check dependencies
• Generate tests Laravel shift is a commercial service.

Lastly

There are plenty of improvements to this approach, please share in the comments below.