How can I remove a package from Laravel using PHP Composer?

Question

What is the correct way to remove a package from Laravel using PHP Composer?

So far I've tried:

1. Remove declaration from file composer.json (in the "require" section)
2. Remove any class aliases from file app.php
3. Remove any references to the package from my code :-)
4. Run composer update
5. Run composer dump-autoload

None of these options are working! What am I missing?

Answer 1

Composer 1.x and 2.x

Running the following command will remove the package from vendor (or wherever you install packages), composer.json and composer.lock. Change vendor/package appropriately.

composer remove vendor/package 

Obviously you'll need to remove references to that package within your app.

I'm currently running the following version of Composer:

Composer version 1.0-dev (7b13507dd4d3b93578af7d83fbf8be0ca686f4b5) 2014-12-11 21:52:29 

Documentation

https://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md#remove

Updates

• 26/10/2020 - Updated answer to assert command works for v1.x and v2.x of Composer

Answer 2

I got it working... The steps to remove a package from Laravel are:

1. Remove the declaration from file composer.json (in the "require" section)
2. **Remove Service Provider from file config/app.php (reference in the "providers" array)
3. Remove any class aliases from file config/app.php
4. Remove any references to the package from your code :-)
5. Run composer update vendor/package-name. This will remove the package folder from the vendor folder and will rebuild the Composer autoloading map.
6. Manually delete the published files (read the comment by zwacky)

It will remove the package folder from the Vendor folder.