How can I use gulp to watch for composer package updates?

Question

Composer is a great tool for dependency management but for local development it can become time consuming to keep running it to update builds. There are ways round this such as symlinking, but with build tools like gulp it seems there should be better ways to monitor changes to local libraries.

Watching a local library makes sense but composer bases it's update decisions on the latest git commit, not on the current state of the working directory. How can I have a gulp watch task update my dependencies?

Answer 1

Turns out that you can simply watch the git reference, as long as your composer dependency is bound to a specific branch:

gulp.watch([
    '/path/to/local/lib/.git/refs/heads/master',
    '/path/to/other/lib/.git/refs/heads/dev',
],['composer']);

Where the composer task is defined

var composer = require('gulp-composer');
gulp.task('composer',function(){
    composer('update',{bin:'php composer.phar'});
});

Solutions which also watch packagist.org would be greatly appreciated and may even beat out my own!