Fixing composer error "Unknown downloader type: vcs" with Satis

Question

Recently, as I upgraded composer to the newest version (2.1.3) , I've started having issues pulling down our satis repositories when running composer update.

The actual error I'm getting is:

usr@srv ~/test $ composer update
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies
Nothing to modify in lock file
Installing dependencies from lock file (including require-dev)
Package operations: 87 installs, 0 updates, 0 removals
As there is no 'unzip' nor '7z' command installed zip files are being unpacked using the PHP zip extension.
This may cause invalid reports of corrupted archives. Besides, any UNIX permissions (e.g. executable) defined in the archives will be lost.
Installing 'unzip' or '7z' may remediate them.
  - Syncing company/satis-company-lib (dev-master 349679e) into cache


  [InvalidArgumentException]
  Unknown downloader type: vcs. Available types: git, svn, fossil, hg, perforce, zip, rar, tar, gzip, xz, phar, file, path.

What's the reason for this error? I realize that it's complaining about the unzipping, but why would that suddenly have started to happen?

My satis config seems to generate vcs repos, but I can't find the config entry to change this (I'm only using git repos when building my satis packages). I also can't figure out how to add the vcs feature to my composer installation.

My satis configuration looks as follows:

{
        "name": "Company PHP Repository",
        "homepage": "https://satis:[email protected]",
        "repositories": [
                {
                        "type": "git",
                        "url": "https://satis:[email protected]/company/company-lib-php.git"
                },
                {
                        "type": "git",
                        "url": "https://satis:[email protected]/company/company-lib-yii-php.git"
                }

        ],
        "require-all": true,
        "archive": {
                "directory": "dist",
                "format": "zip",
                "prefix-url": "https://satis:[email protected]"

        },
        "require-dependencies": true,
        "require-dev-dependencies": true
}

I'm guessing it's to do with the "archive" section not generating the correct dist packages, but I'm unsure.

Answer 1

Let's start out by saying that even after installing unzip nothing is fixed.

After a bunch of debugging, I found out that this logic was slightly changed in 2.1.0:

UX Change: The default install method for packages is now always dist/zip, even for dev packages, added --prefer-install=auto if you want the old behavior (#9603)

There's a few "fixes" to this that I've found so far, but they're really more hacks than actual fixes.

Adding preferred-install to your composer.json file

If you add a composer.json entry of config.preferred-install you can also avoid this new behavior:

{
    "name": "foo/bar",
    "require": {
        "foocompany/lib": "dev-master"
    },
    "repositories": [
        {
            "type": "composer",
            "url": "https://source.companywebsite.com"
        }
    ],
    "config": {
        "preferred-install": {
            "*": "auto"
        }
    }
}

You can either use the full package name ("foocompany/lib": "auto"), a prefix ("foocompany/*": "auto") or all packages by using a start ("*": "auto").

Running command with flag

You can simply call composer update --prefer-install=auto instead of composer update, but this obviously doesn't fix the issue that arises when calling composer update.

Reverting to an older version of composer

You can always revert to other versions of composer by using composer self-update <version>. In the case of downgrading to something before 2.1.0, you can install 2.0.14:

composer self-update 2.0.14

After this you can run composer update like you could before without any issues.

Note: Please don't run old versions of software unless you absolutely have to.

The last resort

If nothing else works, you can usually make it work by forcing composer to fetch from the source instead. Simply use composer update --prefer-source.