What does the different flags of Composer when creating a Laravel project?

Question

Anyone can tell me the difference between this commands

composer create-project laravel/laravel your-project-name --prefer-dist

composer create-project laravel/laravel your-project-name

composer create-project laravel/laravel your-project-name -dev

Answer 1

From the documentation for composer:

--prefer-dist: Reverse of --prefer-source, composer will install from dist if possible. This can speed up installs substantially on build servers and other use cases where you typically do not run updates of the vendors. It is also a way to circumvent problems with git if you do not have a proper setup.

That means Composer will install the dependencies from the distribution build, instead of the sources.

And for the --dev flag:

--dev: Install packages listed in require-dev.

That means Composer will also install all package dependencies list in require-dev key from your composer.json. The require-dev key are dependences only required for development.

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Please, for more information, read the docs regarding Composer CLI: https://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md#create-project