Contao news

Roughly four months have passed since the last major update of the Contao Manager. With version 1.4 we expect to bring you a big performance boost.

Composer 2.0

Last October, we analyzed what major improvements we expected from Composer 2.0. It has since proven itself very well on the command line, now the time has come to use it in Contao Manager as well. At the same time, the Composer Resolver Cloud has been adapted, because a mixed operation of Composer 1 & 2 is not possible.

The switch to Composer 2.0, both in the Contao Manager and in the Composer Resolver Cloud, should work flawlessly for the vast majority of projects. If the dependencies are no longer resolved in an existing installation, this can usually be solved by a complete Composer Update in the System Maintenance section.

The new version bringt some great advantages:

• Composer 2.0 uses about 50% less RAM. This means that the Composer Resolver Cloud can process twice as many jobs simultaneously (for the same money). Therefore, from now on 20 instead of 10 workers are available!
• Not only does Composer 2.0 use less RAM, but the computation time has also been cut in half. Combined with the doubling of the number of workers, this means almost a quadrupling of the performance! We hope that this will make the long waiting times for security updates a thing of the past.
• After the update in the Composer Cloud, Composer 2.0 installs all packages in parallel and not sequentially as it was the case in version 1. This means not only the dependency resolving becomes faster, but the installation of the packages as well.

In the Composer 2.0 blog post (in german), we explained that the new Composer version has been optimized by Yanick Witschi with respect to Contao. The mentioned 50% less RAM and computation time are a rather defensive estimate; in many cases the numbers could be up to 70% better for you. Test it yourself and let us know in the comments!

PS: The Contao Association covers the costs of running the Composer Resolver Cloud and sponsors the development of the Contao Manager. You can support our work with a membership.

Display of new package versions

Many times over, people complained about the fact that the Contao Manager does not show whether there is an update for an extension without first performing a lengthy Composer Dry Run. This was justified by the fact that only a dependency resolving process can tell which packages can actually be installed. Even if Contao 4.9.11 becomes available, this version might not be installed because it conflicts with an installed package or the server setup.

Contao Manager 1.4 now displays likely available new versions. We do that by comparing the available package versions with the defined version constraint. There is a very small chance that a new version will not be installed if there is a conflict with another package. However, we expect the information to be reliable and helpful in most cases.

Composer Resolver Cloud Availability

In version 1.3, a status display for the Composer Resolver Cloud was introduced so that the load and waiting times can be taken into account before package updates. In addition, we now maintain a status page that lists current issues and planned maintenance.