Should composer.lock be committed to version control?

Solution 1:

If you update your libs, you want to commit the lockfile too. It basically states that your project is locked to those specific versions of the libs you are using.

If you commit your changes, and someone pulls your code and updates the dependencies, the lockfile should be unmodified. If it is modified, it means that you have a new version of something.

Having it in the repository assures you that each developer is using the same versions.

Solution 2:

For applications/projects: Definitely yes.

The composer documentation states on this (with emphasis):

Commit your application's composer.lock (along with composer.json) into version control.

Like @meza said: You should commit the lock file so you and your collaborators are working on the same set of versions and prevent you from sayings like "But it worked on my computer". ;-)

For libraries: Probably not.

The composer documentation notes on this matter:

Note: For libraries it is not necessarily recommended to commit the lock file (...)

And states here:

For your library you may commit the composer.lock file if you want to. This can help your team to always test against the same dependency versions. However, this lock file will not have any effect on other projects that depend on it. It only has an effect on the main project.

For libraries I agree with @Josh Johnson's answer.

Solution 3:

After doing it both ways for a few projects my stance is that composer.lock should not be committed as part of the project.

composer.lock is build metadata which is not part of the project. The state of dependencies should be controlled through how you're versioning them (either manually or as part of your automated build process) and not arbitrarily by the last developer to update them and commit the lock file.

If you are concerned about your dependencies changing between composer updates then you have a lack of confidence in your versioning scheme. Versions (1.0, 1.1, 1.2, etc) should be immutable and you should avoid "dev-" and "X.*" wildcards outside of initial feature development.

Committing the lock file is a regression for your dependency management system as the dependency version has now gone back to being implicitly defined.

Also, your project should never have to be rebuilt or have its dependencies reacquired in each environment, especially prod. Your deliverable (tar, zip, phar, a directory, etc) should be immutable and promoted through environments without changing.

Solution 4:

1. You shouldn't update your dependencies directly on Production.
2. You should version control your composer.lock file.
3. You shouldn't version control your actual dependencies.

1. You shouldn't update your dependencies directly on Production, because you don't know how this will affect the stability of your code. There could be bugs introduced with the new dependencies, it might change the way the code behaves affecting your own, it could be incompatible with other dependencies, etc. You should do this in a dev environment, following by proper QA and regression testing, etc.

2. You should version control your composer.lock file, because this stores information about your dependencies and about the dependencies of your dependencies that will allow you to replicate the current state of the code. This is important, because, all your testing and development has been done against specific code. Not caring about the actual version of the code that you have is similar to uploading code changes to your application and not testing them. If you are upgrading your dependencies versions, this should be a willingly act, and you should take the necessary care to make sure everything still works. Losing one or two hours of up time reverting to a previous release version might cost you a lot of money.

One of the arguments that you will see about not needing the composer.lock is that you can set the exact version that you need in your composer.json file, and that in this way, every time someone runs composer install, it will install them the same code. This is not true, because, your dependencies have their own dependencies, and their configuration might be specified in a format that it allows updates to subversions, or maybe even entire versions.

This means that even when you specify that you want Laravel 4.1.31 in your composer.json, Laravel in its composer.json file might have its own dependencies required as Symfony event-dispatcher: 2.*. With this kind of config, you could end up with Laravel 4.1.31 with Symfony event-dispatcher 2.4.1, and someone else on your team could have Laravel 4.1.31 with event-dispatcher 2.6.5, it would all depend on when was the last time you ran the composer install.

So, having your composer.lock file in the version system will store the exact version of this sub-dependencies, so, when you and your teammate does a composer install (this is the way that you will install your dependencies based on a composer.lock) you both will get the same versions.

What if you wanna update? Then in your dev environment run: composer update, this will generate a new composer.lock file (if there is something new) and after you test it, and QA test and regression test it and stuff. You can push it for everyone else to download the new composer.lock, since its safe to upgrade.

3. You shouldn't version control your actual dependencies, because it makes no sense. With the composer.lock you can install the exact version of the dependencies and you wouldn't need to commit them. Why would you add to your repo 10000 files of dependencies, when you are not supposed to be updating them. If you require to change one of this, you should fork it and make your changes there. And if you are worried about having to fetch the actual dependencies each time of a build or release, composer has different ways to alleviate this issue, cache, zip files, etc.