Cannot check out a branch using Composer

Question

I'm trying to check out the doctrine/orm 2.6 branch on Composer, but for some reason this doesn't work:

$ composer require doctrine/orm:dev-2.6

[InvalidArgumentException]
Could not find package doctrine/orm in a version matching dev-2.6

Even though this is the approach suggested in Composer require branch name .

This works with the master branch ( dev-master) , but for some reason doesn't with the 2.6 branch. Why?

How to check out the 2.6 branch using Composer?

Answer 1

When branch names look like versions, we have to clarify for composer that we're trying to check out a branch and not a tag. In the above example, we have two version branches: v1 and v2. To get Composer to check out one of these branches, you must specify a version constraint that looks like this: v1.x-dev. The.x is an arbitrary string that Composer requires to tell it that we're talking about the v1 branch and not a v1 tag (alternatively, you can name the branch v1.x instead of v1). In the case of a branch with a version-like name (v1, in this case), you append -dev as a suffix, rather than using dev- as a prefix.

Therefore, you have to do the following:

composer require doctrine/orm:2.6.x-dev

You can read more from the documentation here: https://getcomposer.org/doc/articles/versions.md#branches