Composer won't update due to changes on the current branch - php

Question

We have composer as our dependency injection framework which will pull in a library we created, foobar, which works fine. The library foobar has 14 version v1.1.1 -> v1.1.14. All the way up to .12 composer updated the app fine. But now we are getting this error:
Update failed (Source directory /home/username/dev/git/appname/vendor/foorbar/library has unpushed changes on the current branch:
Branch v1.1.14 could not be found on the origin remote and appears to be unpushed)
The composer.json:
{
"name": "App",
"description": "Foo Bar",
"require": {
"php": ">=5.3.3",
"zendframework/zendframework": "2.2.",
"foobarzf2lib/library": "v1.1."
},
"minimum-stability": "stable",
"repositories": [
{
"type": "package",
"package": {
"name": "foobarzf2lib/library",
"version": "v1.1.14",
"source": {
"url": "https://git-codecommit.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1/repos/foobarzf2lib",
"type": "git",
"reference": "test"
},
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {
"FooBar\\" : "FooBar/"
}
}
}
}
]
}
More things to know:
Vendor is ignored in git.
Tried doing $ composer.phar clearcache.
Would be ideal to not have to delete the library every time.

Answer 1

Remove vendor folder and reinstall packages.

Answer 2

Branch v1.1.14 could not be found on the origin remote and appears to be unpushed)
This means that wherever you're pulling the package from does not have a v1.1.14.
Make sure you push v1.1.14 to the package provider and everything should be fine.

Answer 3

Composer treats the local repository (the one inside the vendor folder) as leading. Whenever composer thinks it is not connected any longer (or diverged) for the checkout in place, it refuses to update (which I think is good and sane).
This may seem cumbersome but that is perhaps the price to pay for the ease of use. Composer is actually managing that git checkout while taking care of updates (it has various remotes configured and then a cache, all without additional setup).
In my case I can see similar errors (not the exact error message as asked about, I get a notification one or some files were changed without any direct changes when the remote did change non-fast-forward) and I resolved it the following way (perhaps it works in case of a missing branch, too? Nevertheless reviewing the issue with a git command similar to the following might shed better insights):
git -C <path> pull && composer update
Could work then, where <path> is the directory path given in composers' error message. If it does not, a more specific error message from git hopefully says more.
Point in case is that you need to resolve the version conflict before composer continues. That is similar when you have a merge conflict in git, you can't do the next commit without resolving it as otherwise you'd have files in the repository with merge conflict markers (and won't compile).
In case of interest, one aspect of my git configuration is pull.rebase=merges. That is in principle to do a rebase on pull (IIRC perhaps preserving some merges).
As an alternative - and similar to removing the whole vendor folder - removing just the reported path should work. As this is git, that repository is gone and as composer was concerned of it, it is not any longer:
rm -rf -- <path> && composer update
where <path> is (must be) the path in the composer error message. Take care with rm -rf, it can be easily over-reaching - just fyi.
(this is similar to the reported resolution in composers issue tracker)