Composer hanging while updating dependencies

Question

I tried updating a Laravel project I'm working on today using composer update

But it hung on Updating dependencies (including require-dev)

So I tried things like updating composer, dump-autoload, but nothing seemed to work. Then I ran it in verbose mode: composer update -vvv

And I noticed it hung while reading this json:

Reading path/to/Composer/repo/https---packagist.org/provider-cordoval$hamcrest-php.json from cache 

I tried searching for cordoval/hamcrest-php on packagist.org and couldn't find it. This isn't listed as a dependency in my composer.json

Searching through my vendor folder, I notice the mockery/mockery package I use requires hamcrest/hamcrest-php, but I can't find anything that makes any reference to cordoval.

Any idea what's wrong and how I can fix it so that I can do the update?

Here's my composer.json:

{     "name": "laravel/laravel",     "description": "The Laravel Framework.",     "keywords": ["framework", "laravel"],     "license": "MIT",     "require": {         "laravel/framework": "4.2.*",         "iron-io/iron_mq": "dev-master",         "phpunit/phpunit": "4.2.*",         "mockery/mockery": "dev-master",         "xethron/migrations-generator": "dev-master",         "mailgun/mailgun-php": "dev-master"     },     "autoload": {         "classmap": [             "app/commands",             "app/controllers",             "app/models",             "app/database/migrations",             "app/database/seeds",             "app/tests/TestCase.php"         ]     },     "scripts": {         "post-install-cmd": [             "php artisan clear-compiled",             "php artisan optimize"         ],         "post-update-cmd": [             "php artisan clear-compiled",             "php artisan optimize"         ],         "post-create-project-cmd": [             "php artisan key:generate"         ]     },     "config": {         "preferred-install": "dist"     },     "minimum-stability": "stable" } 

Update

I've tried removing some of the packages from my composer.json, including the "mockery/mockery" package. The only change it made was that Composer would hang on a different file.

After leaving Composer running like that for quite a long time, it finally exited with an error such as the following:

/path/to/ComposerSetup/bin/composer: line 18:  1356 Segmentation fault      php "${dir}/composer.phar" $* 

Not sure what to do about that...

Answer 1

In my case, it was simply taking a very long time on my 8GB ram Mac. To check the progress and verify that it is going through the dependencies, run composer in verbose mode. This was an approach I missed in the question so worth re-stating here.

composer update -vvv