How to clone repository with Composer without --prefer-source? (using Symfony 2)

Question

Scenario: I am working with Symfony 2.2. In my list of required packages is also one of my github repositories, let's call it "TestLib".

I know that I can define the github url as additional repository in Symfony's composer.json to download "TestLib" via Composer from Github.

Problem: I cannot commit to "TestLib" repository as there is no local .git directory in the "TestLib" directory. I guess composer is fetching a zip from Github and not cloning it.

So my question is: is there a way to specifiy in Symfony's composer.json that Composer should clone TestLib?

Question 2: Maybe my workflow is wrong - so if you also have this scenario - how do you handle this?

Answer 1

Adding @dev to the package version clones the repository too.

{
  "require": {
    'package': '*@dev'
  }
}

Also is possible setup source as preference in the composer.json

{
 "config": {
     "preferred-install": "source"
 }
}

Answer 2

What I typically do if I notice that a vendor has an issue is rm -rf vendor/foo/bar to remove it and then I run composer install --prefer-source to get it back as a git repo.