Where and how to clean the vendor folder?

Question

Where and how to clean the vendor folder?

"If something is corrupt in your composer and you do composer install/update it won't fix it. You have to force reinstall that package. Try cleaning the vendor folder and run composer install or composer update"

Answer 1

The vendor folder is inside your working directory:

You can remove it with command line:

rm -rf vendor/*

After that run composer:

composer update

Answer 2

If "composer update" doesn't work, then may want to try execute Install after rm command. Like this:

rm -rf vendor/*

After than run composer:

composer install

That will install/download the vendor directory content.

If your composer command not finished but killed, then can try to increase the memory_limit in the php.ini file. So will allow it use more memory for the composer process.

Can check the current memory_limit from your SSH console:

php -i | grep memory

Hope that would help to someone.

Answer 3

I wrote a short shell script that does the job for me. It checks if you are in the correct directory, where the composer.json is inside.

#!/bin/sh

if [ ! -f "./composer.json" ]
then
    echo "File ./composer.json does not exists"
    exit 1
fi

if [ ! -d "./vendor" ]
then
    echo "Directory ./vendor does not exists"
fi

# First call without --quiet to get the output of what exactly was changed
composer install "$@";

rm -rf ./vendor;

# Second call after deleting vendor folder to reinstall everything but with --quiet to not push out the previous output
composer install "$@" --quiet;

It works also with parameters, e.g.:

composer-reinstall -vvv