Managing Timber with Composer

The following guide should help you manage the installed version of Timber. While we work with specific examples for Timber here, what we describe works for most Composer packages.

Updating Timber #

When you want to update to the latest version of Timber, you can run

composer update

This command will also update all other packages to the latest version. If you want to update Timber only, then you can run the following command.

composer update timber/timber

Be aware that depending on what is listed in your composer.json file, updating Timber will give you the latest update within your specified version range.

composer.json

{
  "require": {
    "timber/timber": "^2.0"
  }
}

With this example, you would install all Timber versions bigger than 2.0.0, but smaller than 3.0.0. Here are some other examples:

• 2.4.0: install exactly version 2.4.0
• ^2.4: bigger or equal to 2.4.0, but smaller than 3.0.0
• ^2.4.4: bigger or equal to 2.4.4, but smaller than 3.0.0
• ~2.4.4: bigger or equal to 2.4.4, but smaller than 2.5.0

The Tilde Version Range ~ in the last example would allow you to restrict updating Timber within a minor version. You can read more about that under Version and Constraints.

That’s the beauty of Semantic Versioning and one the reasons we chose to use Composer to manage Timber and not release it as a WordPress plugin. Because when you have a plugin, you can’t really follow semantic versioning and put developers in control of when they want to do a major update.

To install a specific version with the composer require command, you can append the version after a :.

# composer require timber/timber:{version}

composer require timber/timber:2.0.1

Installing non-stable releases #

Installing a pre-release #

Pre-releases of Timber are used to test out releases before we make them stable. Pre-releases are suffixed with -alpha, -beta or -rc.

# Alpha versions.
-alpha1
-alpha2

# Beta versions.
-beta1
-beta2

# Release candidates.
-rc.1
-rc.2

Installing a development version #

When you want to install a development version, you can select pre-release or a Git branch:

# Install the master branch.
composer require timber/timber:dev-master

# Install the beta version of 2.x.
composer require timber/timber:2.x-beta1

# Install the latest work on the 2.x branch.
composer require timber/timber:dev-2.x

# Install a specific commit
composer require timber/timber:dev-master#2cfc7a2eb6c6db743518f8d9d77f2c6259b5d277

To be able to install non-stable releases, you might have to update your minimum stability of your installed packages.

{
    "minimum-stability": "dev",
    "prefer-stable": "true"
}

This means that you will allow Composer to install development versions of packages if they are specifically requested, but still prefer the stable version (with prefer-stable) of other packages, if the version range allows it.