Are you looking to fix the “Composer installation failed deleting ./composer.json file” error?

Lack of enough server resources, missing package links, etc. are the common reasons for Composer installation failures.

At Bobcares, we often get requests to fix Composer errors, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s see a brief guide on how our Support Engineers fixed the Composer error.

What is Composer?

Before getting into the error details, let’s have a quick look at the Composer.

The Composer is an application-level package manager. Installing PHP based applications like the Laravel framework, Doctrine, etc. requires some dependency installation and updates.

Composer makes the task of dependency management easier by checking and installing the required packages with appropriate versions.

Reasons for Installation failed deleting ./composer.json error

To use a Composer for any project, it needs a composer.json file. This file tells the Composer to download the needed dependencies. This file is usually auto-generated while adding any dependency using the require command.

But sometimes while executing the command composer require <package name> the installation fails. Then it shows the error message as “Installation failed deleting ./composer.json”. It displays the exact reason for the error along with it. It can be due to incorrect package links, memory constraints and many more.

Recently, a customer approached us to fix an error he got while installing the Composer. The customer was trying to install the Laravel framework. And the error message appeared as,

Here the error message specifies that there is no enough space, hence it checked for the swap. As there was no memory space and swap, the Composer installation failed.

Now let’s see how our Support Engineers fixed this error.

How we fix the error “Installation failed deleting ./composer.json”?

So far we have seen the reason for the error. Here, the error clearly says that the server is lacking memory for the installation. And one way to resolve this error is to allocate more memory.

Initially, when we get such an error our Support Engineers check the available resources in the server. We check this using the free -m command. This gives a complete picture of both memory and the swap space in the server.

If the server lacks memory space, we ask the customer to add more RAM space.

However, adding more RAM may not be possible in all scenarios. Alternatively, by checking the server space we can also allocate swap space. Usually, this can complete the Composer installation.

Allocating swap space can be recommended when the memory requirement is only for initialization. But this has a downside of slowing down the server.

Here, in this case, our Support Engineers analyzed the server space, memory usage, and performance of the server. Later, we suggested the customer add more RAM to the server. This solved the error and Composer started working fine.

In many error scenarios, the exact reason will be PHP version or missing modules, non-existing package URLs, etc. Therefore, the fix involves installing the missing modules, using valid package URLs in Composer.

[Still, having trouble in fixing Composer errors? – We can help you.]

Conclusion

In short, Composer installation failed deleting ./composer.json error happens due to lack of enough server memory, incorrect package links, etc. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers troubleshoot and fix this error.