Composer: required packages with differing levels of minimum-stability - php

Question

I have a composer file for a laravel installation with the following composer.json file:
{
"name": "laravel/laravel",
"description": "The Laravel Framework.",
"keywords": ["framework", "laravel"],
"license": "MIT",
"require": {
"laravel/framework": "4.1.*"
},
"autoload": {
"classmap": [
"app/commands",
"app/controllers",
"app/models",
"app/database/migrations",
"app/database/seeds",
"app/tests/TestCase.php"
]
},
"scripts": {
"post-install-cmd": [
"php artisan clear-compiled",
"php artisan optimize"
],
"post-update-cmd": [
"php artisan clear-compiled",
"php artisan optimize"
],
"post-create-project-cmd": [
"php artisan key:generate"
]
},
"config": {
"preferred-install": "dist"
},
"minimum-stability": "stable"
}
I'm trying to add in the bundle for sentry. On sentry's website it says I can install it by adding the following to my composer.json file:
{
"require": {
"cartalyst/sentry": "2.0.*"
},
"minimum-stability": "dev"
}
I tried adding the new json object at the end of the current laravel one like so:
...
},
{
"require": {
"cartalyst/sentry": "2.0.*"
},
"minimum-stability": "dev"
}
When I run the composer update command to load the new package I get an error saying that the new object addition is not valid json.
If I add the cartalyst/sentry to the existing require object it cannot find the sentry package because the existing requires have a minimum-stability value of stable.
Is there a way of specifying the sentry package in a separate require object that has the minimum-stability setting of dev?

Answer 1

The answer is just add #dev
{
"require": {
"cartalyst/sentry": "2.0.*#dev"
},
}
You can read more about minimum stability settings here.
An alternative is to set your minimum-stability to dev, but tell composer you want to use stable whenever possible:
"minimum-stability": "dev",
"prefer-stable" : true
This basically means it will always use stable UNLESS there is no way to install a stable dependency, and therefore use dev.

Answer 2

You can also use other levels of stability, like alpha, beta combined with version selector.
Examples
With caret operator - maximum of version 2 allowing beta:
"cartalyst/sentry": "^2#beta"
Any version allowing alpha
"cartalyst/sentry": "*#alpha"

Answer 3

From the composer documentation:
To allow various stabilities without enforcing them at the constraint level however, you may use stability-flags like # (e.g. #dev) to let Composer know that a given package can be installed in a different stability than your default minimum-stability setting.
https://getcomposer.org/doc/articles/versions.md#stability-constraints