Composer killed while updating

Question

I got a problem, I tried to install a new package to my Laravel 4 project. But when I run php composer.phar update I get this:

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

I have looked for the problem in the Internet and saw that the memory is the problem, I think I don't have enough RAM available, I've checked this I have about 411mb free. Does composer really need more RAM?

Solution 1

The "Killed" message usually means your process consumed too much memory, so you may simply need to add more memory to your system if possible. At the time of writing this answer, I've had to increase my virtual machine's memory to at least 768MB in order to get composer update to work in some situations.

However, if you're doing this on a live server, you shouldn't be using composer update at all. What you should instead do is:

1. Run composer update in a local environment (such as directly on your physical laptop/desktop, or a docker container/VM running on your laptop/desktop) where memory limitations shouldn't be as severe.
2. Upload or git push the composer.lock file.
3. Run composer install on the live server.

composer install will then read from the .lock file, fetching the exact same versions every time rather than finding the latest versions of every package. This makes your app less likely to break, and composer uses less memory.

Read more here: https://getcomposer.org/doc/01-basic-usage.md#installing-with-composer-lock

Alternatively, you can upload the entire vendor directory to the server, bypassing the need to run composer install at all, but then you should run composer dump-autoload --optimize.

Solution 2

If like me, you are using some micro VM lacking of memory, creating a swap file does the trick:

#Check free memory before
free -m

mkdir -p /var/_swap_
cd /var/_swap_

#Here, 2G ~ 2GB of swap memory. Feel free to add MORE
sudo fallocate -l 2G swapfile

chmod 600 swapfile
mkswap swapfile
swapon swapfile
#Automatically mount this swap partition at startup
echo "/var/_swap_/swapfile none swap sw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

#Check free memory after
free -m

As several comments pointed out, don't forget to add sudo if you don't work as root.

btw, feel free to select another location/filename/size for the file.
/var is probably not the best place, but I don't know which place would be, and rarely care since tiny servers are mostly used for testing purposes.

Solution 3

Unfortuantely composer requires a lot of RAM & processing power. Here are a few things that I did, which combined, made the process bearable. This was on my cloud playpen env.

1. You may be simply running out of RAM. Enable swap: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/search?q=add+swap (note: I think best practice is to add a seperate partition. Digitalocean's guide is appropriate for their environment)
2. service mysql stop (kill your DB/mem-hog services to free some RAM - don't forget to start it again!)
3. use a secondary terminal session running top to watch memory/swap consumption until process is complete.
4. composer.phar update --prefer-dist -vvv (verbose output [still hangs at some points when working] and use distro zip files). Maybe try a --dry-run too?
5. Composer is apparently know to run slower in older versions of PHP (e.g. 5.3x). It was still slow in 5.5.9 for me...

Solution 4

DigitalOcean fix that does not require extra memory - activating swap, here is an example for 1gb:

in terminal run below

/bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024
/sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1
sudo /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

The above solution will work until the next reboot, after that the swap would have to be reactivated. To persist it between the reboots add the swap file to fstab:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

open the above file add add below line to the file

/var/swap.1 swap swap sw 0 0

now restart the server. Composer require works fine.

Solution 5

I've got this error when I ran composer install inside my PHP DOCKER container, It's a memory issue. Solved by increasing SWAP memory in DOCKER PREFERENCES from 512MB to 1.5GB

To do that:

Docker -> Preferences -> Rousources

View more solutions

Comments

[Ehsan]

When I uploaded composer.lock and run composer install worked. Thanks!

[rafaelphp]

This do not work for me, composer was installer by apt, so I remove it and install manually, then all work fine.

[Muhammad Dyas Yaskur]

return swapon: swapfile: swapon failed: Operation not permitted , Why?

[Balmipour]

@Muhammad Dyas Yaskur If you have no permission problem (be sure to either work as root or use sudo), do you have anything else particular in your configuration (OS, type of drive, etc.) ?

[Muhammad Dyas Yaskur]

@Balmipour I already used as root but still not permited, my os is centos 7.0. [root@server _swap_]# dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1M count=1000 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 2.79954 s, 375 MB/s [root@server _swap_]# ls -l total 1024004 -rw------- 1 root root 1048576000 Feb 6 02:12 swapfile [root@server _swap_]# mkswap swapfile Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1023996 KiB no label, UUID=b3f1110e-5f43-4d1f-bbb1-71cad96680f9 [root@server _swap_]# swapon swapfile swapon: swapfile: swapon failed: Operation not permitted

[Muhammad Dyas Yaskur]

After I research it's caused by my VPS, unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2893/…

[afilina]

I'm having this issue on a local machine.

[Nico Haase]

Please add some explanation to your code such that others can learn from it

[Nico Haase]

This question is about installing some Laravel project. How is your answer related to it?

[XedinUnknown]

This question is about installing a package. Specifically, it is about problems with installing a package that are related to RAM. Why I included information about WP in the answer 2 years ago? I don't know. I've now updated the answer, which IMO is very relevant now.

[DevonDahon]

I replaced top by htop, more convenient.

[Gennadiy Bilyk]

And using df -h. I got this about physical memory was full.

[Hari Harker]

Also look into creating swap file

[dheeraj]

It's best to run thosw commands in root model. ``` sudo su```

[Shawn Pivonka]

When adding '/var/_swap_/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' to /etc/fstab you may have to do it with vim or nano. I had permission issues and using sudo did not work by appending directly to the file as in the example.

[Shawn Pivonka]

For local development for sure go with @Balmipor's Answer, or any other server with a small amount of ram.

[Balmipour]

@Shawn What distribution is it, and do you know why using sudo didn't work ? The only idea which comes to my mind would be SELinux.

[Shawn Pivonka]

@Balmipour I use the Laravel Homestead box * Homestead v10.12.0, v11.0.2 * Settler v9.5.1 (Ubuntu 18.04) * Settler v10.0.0 (Ubuntu 20.04) I would thank that had i done "sudo su" then it would have worked without sudo.

[Kaushik shrimali]

Andreas, Solved by up memory limit from php.ini

[Farhan Ibn Wahid]

please specify what does this code do and where to apply... @Ali

[AsTeR]

In case you were like me, even if the memory limit is sky high check still your machine / container max memory.

[Kirit Patel]

I was in troubling since last 4 days and finally has fixed by the "composer dump-autoload --optimize". thanks!. you saved me.

[Lucas Basquerotto]

In a linux machine with journalctl, you can run journalctl | grep oom to print the logs related to processes killed due to Out of Memory (or journalctl -n 1000 | grep oom to search only in the last 1000 logs). In my case, I had a process running in a docker container that had the memory limit defined as 256MB, and the process in it was killed due to OOM, so i increased the maximum allowed memory for the container and solved the problem.

[Stef Van Looveren]

Swapfile did the trick for me too: stefvanlooveren.me/blog/…

[Balmipour]

@Hackinet Thanks for your edit. I got 2 questions about it : ▓ 1: You added a sudo. Thats good, but is it really the only one necessary in the whole process ? If not, it would be quite inconsistent. (I chose to keep sudos as "an option" because I consider one can afford to work directly as root on small disposable VMs) ▓ 2: fallocate looks way better/cleaner than dd, but is it as universal as it ? I suppose it is, but just would like to ensure the less prone-to-be-unavailable tools are suggested, so that this post still solves an issue, rather than creating a new one :)

[Asad Iftikhar]

after stoping mysql services, it works for me. Thanks @alirobe

[Jorge Ribeiro]

Increased my Swap from 1GB to 2GB and it worked!

[PatricNox]

The docker ram increase was the key!