Want to add a new plugin using composer instead of updating all plugins

Question

I want to add a particular plugin in my laravel app using composer. I don't want to sync whole of the plugins with composer.json, I just want to add a new plugin.

If I remove rest of the plugins and add a json value i.e. "mgallegos/laravel-jqgrid": "1.*", once the files are downloaded, all of the plugins get removed because they are not mentioned there in json file.

Can I only add 1 particular plugin without making any changes in rest of the plugins?

Here is what my json file looks like:

Answer 1

To install particular package, use require command like this:

composer require vendor/package_name ~version

To update only single package, use update command:

composer update vendor/package_name

To update multiple packages at once:

composer update vendor/package_name vendor/package_name2

Options with update command:

• --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-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.
  
• --classmap-authoritative (-a): Autoload classes from the classmap only. Implicitly enables --optimize-autoloader.
  
• --lock: Only updates the lock file hash to suppress warning about the lock file being out of date.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.
  
• --root-reqs: Restricts the update to your first degree dependencies.
  
• --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.
  

Reference: https://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md