changing name of project in composer.json in fork/branch impossible? - php

Question

i currently ran into a problem with renaming a project in composer.json.
the previos status was like the following:
{
"name": "old/name",
"license": "Business",
"type": "library",
"description": "description",
"autoload": {},
"minimum-stability":"dev",
"require": {
"php": ">=5.3.3"
},
"require-dev": {
"sensio/generator-bundle": "~2.5",
"phpunit/phpunit": "~4.6",
"mockery/mockery": "0.9.4",
"leaphub/phpcs-symfony2-standard": "~2.0.0"
},
"scripts": {
},
"extra": {
},
"branch-alias": {
"dev-master": "2.6-dev",
}
}
}
now i need to change this to
{
"name": "new/name",
"license": "Business",
"type": "library",
"description": "description",
....
}
therefore i created a new branch, changed the information, created a branch-alias to reference it in the target-project.
...
"repositories": [
{
"type": "vcs",
"url": "git#github.com:matthias-chlechowitz/forked-repo.git"
}
],
"require": {
"new/name":"dev-matthias/rewrite-branchname"
}
...
but when running composer update to fetch the updated version, the old version with the previous project name is fetched and the following error message appears:
Problem 1
- The requested package new/name could not be found in any version, there may be a typo in the package name.
so it's not possible to rename projects within one repo or even forks? or am i missing a major part?
best regards,
matthias

Answer 1

thank you for your answer, but referencing a new branch was not the problem (which was working perfectly fine). The problem was really changing the name of the project (name-property in the composer.json).
According to Christophe Coevoet [1], composer always fetches the name from the master branch, so my changes in forked or derived branches doesn't affect the outcome.
Best regards,
Matthias
[1] https://github.com/composer/composer/issues/4677