How to update a single library with Composer?

Question

I need to install only 1 package for my SF2 distribution (DoctrineFixtures).

When I run

php composer.phar update 

I get

  - Updating twig/twig (dev-master 39d94fa => v1.13.0)     The package has modified files:     M CHANGELOG     M doc/filters/batch.test     M doc/filters/index.rst     M doc/filters/url_encode.rst     M doc/functions/index.rst     M doc/tags/index.rst     M doc/tests/index.rst     M lib/Twig/Autoloader.php     M lib/Twig/Compiler.php     M lib/Twig/CompilerInterface.php -10 more files modified, choose "v" to view the full list 

It appears the last developer edited a lot of files inside vendor.

In order to get around this, I tried

php composer.phar update <package_name> 

But that doesn't seem to work. How can I update/install only one library from composer.json?

Answer 1

To install doctrine/doctrine-fixtures-bundle with version 2.1.* and minimum stability @dev use this:

composer require doctrine/doctrine-fixtures-bundle:2.1.*@dev 

then to update only this single package:

composer update doctrine/doctrine-fixtures-bundle 

Answer 2

If you just want to update a few packages and not all, you can list them as such:

php composer.phar update vendor/package:2.* vendor/package2:dev-master 

You can also use wildcards to update a bunch of packages at once:

php composer.phar update vendor/* 

• --prefer-source: Install packages from source when available.
• --prefer-dist: Install packages from dist when available.
• --ignore-platform-reqs: ignore php, hhvm, lib-* and ext-* requirements and force the installation even if the local machine does not fulfill these. See also the platform config option.
• --dry-run: Simulate the command without actually doing anything.
• --dev: Install packages listed in require-dev (this is the default behavior).
• --no-dev: Skip installing packages listed in require-dev. The autoloader generation skips the autoload-dev rules.
• --no-autoloader: Skips autoloader generation.
• --no-scripts: Skips execution of scripts defined in composer.json.
• --no-plugins: Disables plugins.
• --no-progress: Removes the progress display that can mess with some terminals or scripts which don't handle backspace characters.
• --optimize-autoloader (-o): Convert PSR-0/4 autoloading to classmap to get a faster autoloader. This is recommended especially for production, but can take a bit of time to run so it is currently not done by default.
• --lock: Only updates the lock file hash to suppress warning about the lock file being out of date.
• --with-dependencies: Add also all dependencies of whitelisted packages to the whitelist.
• --prefer-stable: Prefer stable versions of dependencies.
• --prefer-lowest: Prefer lowest versions of dependencies. Useful for testing minimal versions of requirements, generally used with --prefer-stable.