Here’s something about Composer that I can never remember, I always have to look up, and I always have a hard time finding where it is in the documentation. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you platform packages:

Platform packages

Composer has platform packages, which are virtual packages for things that are installed on the system but are not actually installable by Composer. This includes PHP itself, PHP extensions and some system libraries.

• php represents the PHP version of the user, allowing you to apply constraints, e.g. >=5.4.0. To require a 64bit version of php, you can require the php-64bit package.

• hhvm represents the version of the HHVM runtime (aka HipHop Virtual Machine) and allows you to apply a constraint, e.g., ‘>=2.3.3’.

• ext-<name> allows you to require PHP extensions (includes core extensions). Versioning can be quite inconsistent here, so it’s often a good idea to just set the constraint to *. An example of an extension package name is ext-gd.

• lib-<name> allows constraints to be made on versions of libraries used by PHP. The following are available: curl, iconv, icu, libxml, openssl, pcre, uuid, xsl.

You can use composer show --platform to get a list of your locally available platform packages.

So that’s the relevant portion of the documentation, and its composer show --platform that lists local platform packages. Maybe now I’ll remember.