composer discard changes: what do the [y,n,v,d,s,?] do

Question

Simple question that's been bugging me for months.

Occasionally I'll dive into the vendors directory to fix a bug (especially for our internal libs). After migrating and deploying the fix back to the source package, I'll composer update company/package in the main project and am asked:

Discard changes [y,n,v,d,s,?]

I have a decent grasp on y and n but haven't been able to find documentation about what v, d, s, ? do? I always hit y but maybe I'm missing out on something useful.

Edits:

added d option (oct '17)

Have you tried using `?`? This will probably bring up a nice help message. — nneonneo, Sep 13 '14 at 22:00
Sure. Things is it takes about two minutes for composer to do the update, recognize the dirty state and when doing actually work muscle memory kicks in I hit `y` and have no ability to hit `?` without waiting another couple of minutes. I figure if I'm scratching my head others are too. — Mark Fox, Sep 13 '14 at 22:12
this has got to be one of the misleading messages i've ever seen "updated, discard changes"? yes actually does not disccard changes and no actually does. wtf — user151496, Jun 23 '23 at 09:21

score 234 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 07 '19 at 21:02

234

Choosing ? shows you the details:

y - discard changes and apply the update
n - abort the update and let you manually clean things up
v - view modified files
d - view local modifications (diff)
s - stash changes and try to reapply them after the update

You can also check the source code, the relevant part is here.

edited Dec 07 '19 at 21:02

Mark Fox

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answered Sep 13 '14 at 22:03

Gergo Erdosi

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score 46 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 24 '20 at 11:12

46

If you run with the --no-interaction, you can set discard-changes: true in composer.json file and you wont get prompted for this option every time.

Or, run:

COMPOSER_DISCARD_CHANGES=true composer install --no-interaction

edited Jan 24 '20 at 11:12

Jon Winstanley

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answered Jun 09 '15 at 22:58

Reza S

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Is there anyway to make this option kick in without running with `--no-interaction` – Jake Sylvestre Jun 22 '16 at 13:45
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@JakeSylvestre maybe a year late, but this might be useful for others with similar problem: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18812171/1097372 – Iyas Jul 24 '17 at 20:56
@lyas Ah, great! Thanks. – Jake Sylvestre Jul 24 '17 at 21:22
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There is env var to control discard-changes `COMPOSER_DISCARD_CHANGES=true composer install --no-interaction` – 5n00py Feb 28 '19 at 12:25

composer discard changes: what do the [y,n,v,d,s,?] do

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