i ran in a problem using composer for installing/uninstalling some dependencies in laravel which coming back after deleting them from composer.json and deleting their vendor folder, i initially used dflydev's markdown package but now i wanted to change it to michelf's php-markdown, but i cant uninstall the old one since it comes back loaded from cache, which i checked at AppData\Roaming\Composer and is empty, any clue on to why this is happening?

                                  - Installing dflydev/markdown (dev-master dee1f7a)     Loading from cache

Machavity♦

29.3k 26 gold badges 84 silver badges 94 bronze badges

asked Mar 27 '14 at 22:39

2

  • Have you tried anything to resolve this problem? If yes, please share your attempts

    Apr 24 '20 at 8:58

  • I tried adding --no-cache option to my composer command and it downloaded the dependencies without loading them from cache....

    Oct 29 '20 at 19:56

9 Answers 9

You can use the following command to clear the cache irrespective of the OS you are on:

                  php composer.phar clear-cache

or if composer is installed globally 

                  composer clear-cache

Hope this helps

KTPatel

1,194 4 gold badges 18 silver badges 24 bronze badges

answered Dec 14 '16 at 11:10

3

  • Unless I deleted my composer.lock file, the clear-cache commands had no effect.

    Apr 25 '19 at 16:04

  • Remember that it must be executed with root(super user).

    Mar 26 '20 at 18:56

  • Please add some further explanation to your answer. How does clearing the cache of downloaded files help to install or not install any pacakge?

    Apr 24 '20 at 8:59

I think, you can run your composer commands with --no-cache option flag like

                composer install --no-cache

Or

                composer require <package-name> --no-cache

Or

                composer update [<package-name>] --no-cache

answered Aug 24 '20 at 15:07

If you want to clear all packages cache, please try following:

                  $ composer clearcache

Or to just clear one or a few packages: 

                    $ composer clearcache packagename1 packagename2 ...

You can also use clear-cache which is an alias for clearcache.

Source : https://blog.liplex.de/clear-composer-cache/

answered Sep 30 '17 at 12:47

2

  • It's not possible anymore to clear cache for specific packages. There is a comment in the post you've referenced and the post itself was updated.

    Jul 13 '18 at 19:44

  • Please add some further explanation to your answer. How does clearing the cache of downloaded files help to install or not install any pacakge?

    Apr 24 '20 at 8:58

composer caches packages under vendor/packagename convention. So you shouldn't run into any issue, just because the packagename is used in another vendor's package.

the cache locations are:

  • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Composer\files\vendor\packagename
  • Linux: ~/.composer/cache/files/vendor/packagename
  • Mac OS: ~/.composer/cache/files/packagename

Raunak Gupta

9,264 2 gold badges 47 silver badges 82 bronze badges

answered Mar 27 '14 at 22:48

2

  • under windows its %LOCALAPPDATA%\Roaming\Composer and its as i said empty, and the package in question isn't used in any dependency as a i just installed it recently.

    Mar 27 '14 at 23:13

  • Please add some further explanation to your answer. How does clearing the cache of downloaded files help to install or not install any pacakge?

    Apr 24 '20 at 8:59

Don't edit your composer.json file manually to remove a package - it will remain in composer.lock.

Use composer remove to delete the old package then composer require to install the replacement.

answered Apr 24 '20 at 4:50

4

  • This looks like the first attempt to really solve the problem - thanks for your answer!

    Apr 24 '20 at 9:00

  • Yeah... We should probably change the question title, it's a bit misleading

    Apr 25 '20 at 10:23

  • This doesn't work if the package has been installed via dependency. There are reasons why you might need to manually edit composer.json ie if you want to update a reference to use a local path for a package.

    May 1 '20 at 8:17

  • > This doesn't work if the package has been installed via dependency. Correct. But the OP states directly that they are deleting the items from composer.json and they are magically returning > There are reasons why you might need to manually edit composer.json Absolutely. Again, not applicable in this context, where the OP is trying to remove a whole package. I could have said "run composer update after deleting the value" but that comes with so much more required knowledge.

    May 5 '20 at 1:24

In some cases (for example OpenSuse 42.1) all user cache are puts in:

                  ~/.cache/

For the composer, the same as other applications, the cache path is:

                  ~/.cache/composer/

So, just remove this folder as follow:

                  rm -fR ~/.cache/composer

answered Feb 19 '17 at 20:50

1

  • Please add some further explanation to your answer. How does clearing the cache of downloaded files help to install or not install any pacakge?

    Apr 24 '20 at 8:59

run the following command

                  rm -rf ~/.composer/cache*

if Permission denied add sudo

answered Nov 8 '16 at 9:03

2

  • If some one is having permissions issues in their own home directory, "add sudo" to a rm -rf command that includes a wildcard is not a good idea.

    Apr 22 '20 at 16:07

  • Please add some further explanation to your answer. How does clearing the cache of downloaded files help to install or not install any pacakge?

    Apr 24 '20 at 8:59

On Window, I see the composer cache file located in
C:\Users\{your_user}\AppData\Local\Composer\files

enter image description here

It stores ZIP files. The below image has 2 Zip files because I have downloaded 2 versions of monolog (1.0.1 and 1.0.2) enter image description here

To remove the cache, simply delete the Zip file or folder.

answered Apr 28 '20 at 14:46

So the only thing that worked for me on my Macbook was removing the package from my composer.json, deleting my composer.lock, running composer update, then adding the package back to composer.json, deleting my composer.lock(again), and running composer update (again). I had a local package in my instance of Laravel Nova that I changed to all lowercase from CamelCase and no matter what I did, it kept adding the package with the old CamelCase name. Didn't matter if I cleared caches or anything.

answered Sep 8 '20 at 16:33

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