Problems running composer --version on windows

[zobo]

Bug report

Question	Answer
Box version	4.6.5@0964604
PHP version	8.2.8
Platform with version	Windows 11
Github Repo	https://github.com/phpactor/phpactor

I was trying to box the application on Windows and got the error Could not determine the Composer version from the following output:

The last version that worked was 4.5.0.

Running the command with --debug I saw that in 4.5.0 the composer command used was:

? Checking Composer compatibility
    > c:\...\zobo\tools\php\composer.BAT --version --no-ansi
    > Version detected: 2.4.4 (Box requires ^2.2.0)
    > Supported version detected

The output of 4.6.5 was:

? Checking Composer compatibility
    > c:\...\zobo\tools\php\composer.phar --version --no-ansi

Naturally windows cannot run a .phar (at least on on my system) so overriding with cli options does work:

php box.phar compile -c ../box.json --debug --composer-bin=c:\...\zobo\tools\php\composer.BAT
...
? Checking Composer compatibility
    > c:/.../zobo/tools/php/composer.BAT --version --no-ansi
    > Version detected: 2.4.4 (Box requires ^2.2.0)
    > Supported version detected

Is there anything that can be done about fixing this detection?

box.json.dist

{
 "compression": "GZ",
 "directories": [
   "templates"
 ],
 "files": [
   "LICENSE"
 ],
 "finder": [
   {
     "exclude": [
       "Tests"
     ],
     "in": "lib"
   },
   {
     "name": "{\\.(php|bash|fish|zsh)}",
     "exclude": [
       "tests",
       "test"
     ],
     "in": "vendor"
   }
 ],
 "git-tag": "git_tag",
 "intercept": true,
 "output": "build/phpactor.phar"
} ```
</details>

[theofidry]

Is there anything that can be done about fixing this detection?

I am sure something can be done, but I do not know how to fix it (I admit I never really used Windows either).

Most of the logic can be found here in case you take check it out yourself: https://github.com/box-project/box/blob/main/src/Composer/ComposerProcessFactory.php

[zobo]

Thanks. I'll try to take a look... time permitting.

[zobo]

The difference is in Symfony\Component\Process\ExecutableFinder. Box 4.5.0 uses symfony/process:v6.1.3 and Box 4.6.6 uses symfony/process:v7.2.4.

The old one had a list of suffixes where .phar would be appended:

The new one appends some common suffixes when doing the $executableFinder->find('composer') call and ends up with:

Getting the same behaviour one would need to do something like this in ComposerProcessFactory::retrieveComposerExecutable

    private static function retrieveComposerExecutable(): string
    {
        $executableFinder = new ExecutableFinder();
// first add the old hard coded suffixes
        if ('\\' === \DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR) {
            $executableFinder->setSuffixes(['.exe', '.bat', '.cmd', '.com']);
        }
//
        $executableFinder->addSuffix('.phar');
        if (null === $composer = $executableFinder->find('composer')) {
            throw new RuntimeException('Could not find a Composer executable.');
        }
        return $composer;
    }

[theofidry]

Ha, I admit I totally expected the Symfony Executable Finder to handle that itself...

[MIvanIsten]

Symfony Executable Finder works fine. The problem is: .phar is not executable on windows, should not look for it.

Update https://github.com/box-project/box/blob/1d46320ee6aac18f494a43b57909e01da59a81a1/src/Composer/ComposerProcessFactory.php#L156 to

if (PHP_OS_FAMILY !== "Windows") {
  $executableFinder->addSuffix('.phar');
}

[simonhampel]

I am experiencing the same issue on Windows using Box v4.6.5 that ships with Laravel Zero v12.

I tested multiple versions and have determined that up to Box v4.6.3 works fine on Windows, while v4.6.4 and above are broken due to this issue with composer.phar vs composer.bat.

I was able to manually replace the version of Box in Laravel Zero with v4.6.3 and Laravel Zero now works again.