[FIXED] What does the tilde (~) mean in my composer.json file?

Issue

I have this line in my composer.json file:

"require": {
    ...
    "friendsofsymfony/user-bundle": "~2.0@dev",
    ...
},

What does the tilde ~ in ~2.0@dev exactly mean? Is that a placeholder and shall always fetch the subversions like 1.2.0, 2.2.0, 3.2.0 and so on? Doesn't make sense (and would be done by the * wildcard).

The composer.json documentation doesn't tell anything about the tilde.

I am asking because I just read about a security issue in the Symfony blog and they recommend to upgrade to version 1.3.3. But figuring out the FOSUserBundle's version isn't that easy (I couldn't find a file that contains the version).

Solution

Tilde means next significant release. In your case, it is equivalent to >= 2.0, < 3.0.

The full explanation is at Tilde Version Range docs page:

The ~ operator is best explained by example: ~1.2 is equivalent to >=1.2 <2.0.0, while ~1.2.3 is equivalent to >=1.2.3 <1.3.0.

Another way of looking at it is that using ~ specifies a minimum version, but allows the last digit specified to go up.

Seldeak's below comment is a simple sum up explanation of the Composer documentation.

Answered By - AlterPHP

Answer Checked By - David Goodson (PHPFixing Volunteer)