Updating Craft 3 from RC3 to RC4 through Composer

Question

I have a problem when updating with Composer.

My installation command line was this one:

php composer.phar create-project -s RC craftcms/craft $HOME/craft

As such, I tried to update, as per Ryan from Mijingo instructions:

php composer.phar update craftcms/craft

But I ended up with the following error:

Composer could not find a composer.json file in /home/me
To initialize a project, please create a composer.json file as described in the https://getcomposer.org/ "Getting Started" section

I checked, composer.json and composer.lock are in the craft directory, as expected.

After looking through Composer man page and web docs, I am still clueless, as I haven't found what -s RC are used for in the installation command. I believe understanding these (this?) switches is probably the key, but I rather ask here than making a mistake and blowing the otherwise perfectly working install. ^^

As for the CP, it doesn't work either, but that is not a surprise given the command line didn't and that I am using the php composer.phar method rather than the sole composer one.

Answer 1

So, not all hosts allow just using composer and impose to use php composer.phar.

Knowing that, I can now answer my two questions:

1. When installing Craft using php composer.phar create-project -s RC craftcms/craft $HOME/craft, the -s switch is just telling which branch of the source project to use. Here, RC stands for Release Candidate. Before that, we had to use -s BETA in order to install the betas. Something I didn't knew since I waited for the RC to jump in Craft 3 and start over from Craft 2.

2. When you want to update using php composer.Phar, you need to go inside your project folder (where you installed Craft; craft for me which means once logged I had to cd craft) and then type php ../composer.phar update, where ../composer.phar tells to go looking for Composer from the parent folder.

I am ashamed not having thought of that; I really need to stop overthinking things.