Permissions issue when trying to install Symfony Application with Composer

Question

Please refrain from commenting your suggestion unless you've read through my list of troubleshooting steps. I am updating this list as suggestions come in.

On my co-worker's Windows 7 environment, when trying to install one of our apps built on Symfony 2.5.*, we get the following problem with unlink:

We have tried the following:

• Running composer self-update
• Running composer update instead of composer install (which resulted in the same error below)
• Running the git bash in Administrator mode
• Running composer install from an Administrator DOS shell instead of the git bash
• Cloning our repository in multiple locations, including directly on the User Desktop
• Changing the permissions of the files to give full control and ownership to the current user (recursively)
• Changing the permissions of the files to give full control and ownership to "Everybody" (recursively)
• Changing the permissions of the files to give full control and ownership to "SYSTEM" (recursively)
• Starting a new project from scratch using composer create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition test/ "2.5.*" and composer create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition path/ "2.3.*" (in case the issue is version-specific)
• Trying on a different Windows 7 machine (with the same result)
• Removing the vendor folder and clearing the composer cache
• Turning off the Indexer (Windows Search System)

Any ideas on what's going on? Is this a composer bug, or one of the pleasures of working with Windows? Everything above runs fine on my OSX machine.

Another debugging note... when I try to manually unlink with php -r "unlink('...');" it deletes the file in question no problems

Answer 1

I've found the issue. An office-wide anti-virus program called "Trend Micro" was doing a "live scanning" of any newly created files. Since the anti-virus program was accessing the file at the same time composer was trying to unlink the files, composer would fail. Adding the repository as to the anti-virus whitelist (as well as the Windows Indexer to be safe) fixed the problem entirely.

I have created an issue in GitHub for the composer team to work on so that this exception could be handled somehow (e.g. a sleep function upon failure of the unlink)

Thanks for the troubleshooting help, everyone.

EDIT: As of this edit, a fix has been written, so if you run into this problem, just run composer self-update to ensure Composer has the latest fix for this.