Does the "version" in Composer git repository refer to the release (tag) on GitHub?

Question

I need to use Composer to manage a dependency (normalize.css and others) without composer.js in the project root. I ended up defining a package but I have a few questions:

{
    "require": {
        "twbs/bootstrap": "~3.0",
        "fortawesome/font-awesome": "~3.2",
        "necolas/normalize.css": "*"
    },
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type":"package",
            "package": {
                "name": "necolas/normalize.css",
                "version":"2",
                "source": {
                    "url": "https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css.git",
                    "type": "git",
                    "reference":"master"
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}

Does the version in my package refer to a release (tag) in the GitHub repository? If yes, how can I specify i.e. ~2.1 (I get invalid package definition) or the latest tag available?

For necolas/normalize.css I'd like to always get the latest version of the master branch.

Answer 1

Here is my solution:

For test purpose I have this composer.json file:

{
    "name": "mycompagny/composer-project",
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "http://localhost/git/test.composer.dep.git"
        }
    ],
    "require" : {
        "mycompagny/test.composer.dep": "dev-master#v2.0.0"
    },
    "minimum-stability": "dev"
}

In the require key, put #youversion after dev-master to point to your git tag "yourversion".

The tag after # here act as a commit. (according to : https://getcomposer.org/doc/04-schema.md#package-links)

Answer 2

"Does the version in my package refer to a release"

No, a version inside a package entry defines the version number that Composer should refer to this package as.

Setting the version explicitly is required for packages unfortunately, even if they are coming from Git.

"how can I specify i.e. ~2.1 (I get invalid package definition) or the latest tag available?"

It looks like you can't. The version listed in a package has to be an actual version number, rather than a version number range, and there's no way to fetch the tags from Git, which sucks.

If you were to replace using a Package repository to using a zipball Artifact package, it would be really easy to add a composer.json with the relevant info after you've downloaded the zipball from Github.

I've added that as a proof of concept to https://github.com/Danack/IntahwebzRepo , which is a simple script to download zipballs from Github, and then either add a version entry to their composer.json, or completely generate a composer.json if they don't already have one.

Once the zipballs are downloaded and modified it then uses them in a Satis (aka Packagist) repository.