composer update killed on ec2 micro

I was updating my symfony plugins using composer and I received the following error in ssh:

Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
Killed

My research founded that it's because the ec2 instance does not have enough ram to perform such an update.

What you can do is to do a "composer.phar update" in a local machine. This would produce a composer.lock file.

Upload this .lock file to production, and run "composer.phar install" instead.

Composer Update doesn't install files

If you ever update with composer.phar and not seem to get any files fetched, it may be a cache issue.

Remove the composer cache folder.

Ex. rm -rf /root/.composer

Make sure you delete the whole .composer folder. Not just the cache folder inside.

Symfony 2 Composer - error occurred when generating the bootstrap file

[RuntimeException]                                  
An error occurred when generating the bootstrap file.

If you see the following error during updating Symfony vendors via Composer, do the following:


php composer update --no-scripts
php vendor/sensio/distribution-bundle/Sensio/Bundle/DistributionBundle/Resources/bin/build_bootstrap.php