Today Composer released v2.0 with many changes and performance improvements:

We overhauled pretty much everything from the protocol used between Composer and packagist.org to the dependency resolution, including downloading files in parallel using curl and constraint evaluation optimizations. This leads to massive improvements in terms of both speed and memory usage. The difference depends on your use case, so while I’ve seen reports of improvements of over 50% to both in some projects, I cannot put an exact number on it. But I am sure you will be positively surprised if you haven’t tried Composer 2 yet.

I updated my local Composer version to the beta version last week and can confirm it feels much faster than v1 and uses less memory. Updating is also easy and here is the instructions they outline:

If you run composer self-update from 1.x, it will warn you that a new stable major version of Composer is available, and you can use composer self-update --2 to migrate to it.

Should you encounter issues, you can go back at any time by using composer self-update --1. Hopefully that will make everyone feel comfortable to experiment with the new release.

Check out their official announcement for complete details and the changelog.

Eric is the creator of Laravel News and has been covering Laravel since 2012.

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