package-updater

A Laravel Zero CLI for bulk-updating Composer packages — and Craft itself / Craft plugins — across every repo on your machine. Runs git pull on the appropriate long-lived branch (develop → dev → staging → stag → stage → main → master → prod → live), then the package update, optional composer prep, optional site-crawler. Skips dirty repos, captures full per-repo transcripts, summarises everything, and offers to open repos with uncommitted changes in GitKraken for review.

1. Installation

Global (recommended)

composer global require webhubworks/package-updater

Make sure Composer's global bin directory is on your PATH — typically ~/.composer/vendor/bin (macOS/Linux) or %APPDATA%\Composer\vendor\bin (Windows). After that, both package-updater and the shorter alias pu are available from anywhere.

Set REPOS_DIR in your shell (or via .env next to the tool) so it points at the directory you want scanned (defaults to $HOME/reps). The walker descends through grouping folders (e.g. ~/reps/my7steps/<repo>), considers a directory a candidate only when it contains a composer.lock, and filters out anything that's not a git repo or that itself declares "type": "craft-plugin".

To upgrade later:

composer global update webhubworks/package-updater

Local clone (for development)

cd ~/reps
git clone <repo-url> package-updater
cd package-updater
composer install
./package-updater list

2. Commands

Run pu <name> (or the longer package-updater <name>). Bare pu prints the command list. Every command is fully interactive — it will prompt for any answer it needs.

update

Single-repo helper. Run it from inside a repo: it verifies the working tree is clean, runs composer update (auto-detecting ddev when .ddev/config.yaml exists), parses Upgrading / Downgrading / Installing / Removing lines from composer's output, and commits the result with title Package updates and a body listing each change. Optional package arguments (pu update vendor/foo vendor/bar) restrict the update to those packages. Use --no-ddev to force host composer, --commit / --no-commit to skip the commit prompt.

update:all

Universal bulk update — one composer package across every local repo that depends on it. Pick a vendor/name, pick a target version, pick which of the matching repos to run on, pick parallelism, confirm. Each repo runs git pull → ddev start → ddev composer update → composer prep (if defined) → ddev stop (optional). Repos already at the target version are pre-skipped; with a bare target version, repos on a different major are pre-skipped too (prefix the version with ! to force across majors).

--filter-name=<substring> narrows the match set to repos whose composer.json name contains the given substring — e.g. pu update:all vendor/foo --filter-name=mvb only considers repos with mvb in their composer name.

The package argument also accepts a wildcard — e.g. pu update:all 'laravel-lang/*' matches every locked package under that vendor prefix and runs composer update laravel-lang/* -W per repo. Wildcards skip the target-version and transitive-parent prompts and always pass -W (composer almost always needs it to bump siblings together). Quote the pattern in your shell so it isn't glob-expanded.

remove

Bulk counterpart for removing a package. Same scan as update:all, including wildcard support (pu remove 'laravel-lang/*'). Pre-skips repos where the package is only a transitive dependency (composer remove only works on declared deps) and pre-skips dirty repos. For each remaining repo it detects whether the package is in require or require-dev and groups the removals so composer is called with --dev for the dev-only ones (plain for the rest). On success it commits the change with title Remove <package> (or Remove N packages for wildcards) and a body listing the removed names.

pu remove vendor/foo                   # exact name
pu remove 'laravel-lang/*' --dry-run   # preview which packages would be removed

update:craft

Craft-aware variant. Same flow, but:

• Identifies repos by Craft plugin handle (or the literal craft to match every site with craftcms/cms in composer.json).
• After ddev start, always syncs the working copy before the update: ddev composer install → ddev php craft migrate/all → ddev php craft project-config/apply.
• Runs ddev php craft update <handle> (with sensible defaults you can edit at the prompt) instead of composer update.
• After composer prep, optionally runs site-crawler crawl:ddev in a second multiselect-chosen subset of repos. Parses the crawler's "Failed requests" table and warns on any 5xx URLs even if the crawler itself exited cleanly.

--filter-name=<substring> works the same way as on update:all: restricts the match set to repos whose composer.json name contains the substring.

retry

Re-runs the most recent update:all or update:craft non-interactively using the answers persisted in logs/last-run.json. Useful for working through a batch in chunks — already-up-to-date repos are skipped by the target-version filter, so each retry picks up where the previous one left off.

open

Opens repos from the most recent run in GitKraken (one tab per repo via the gitkraken:// URL scheme). By default it surfaces repos that warrant review: uncommitted working-tree changes, failed steps, failing tests after composer prep, crawler failures, or 5xx URLs from the crawler. You can narrow the pool with --filter=changed, --filter=failed, or --filter=all. Both update:all and update:craft also offer this prompt directly at the end of a run — push the resulting commits via GitKraken without context-switching.

Logs and transcripts

• logs/transcripts/<repo>-<timestamp>.log — full output of every step for one repo, from git status to ddev stop. Always written, success or fail.
• logs/<repo>-<step>-<timestamp>.log — narrow per-step log written when a specific command fails or its tests don't pass.
• logs/last-run.json — the resolved command + arguments + options of the last run (powers retry).
• logs/last-results.json — per-repo results of the last run (powers open).

In sequential mode (--parallel=1) every step's output streams live to the terminal. Parallel mode does not stream (output would interleave) — the transcript and per-step logs are how you investigate.

3. Configuration

Repo directory

REPOS_DIR (env var, or .env next to the tool when running from a local clone) — single source of truth for where to scan. Default: $HOME/reps. Per-run override available on every command via --reps-dir=.

Git credentials (HTTPS remotes)

The tool shells out to git, which uses your CLI credentials — not GitKraken's. For HTTPS GitHub remotes, install and configure the GitHub CLI once:

brew install gh
gh auth login          # pick HTTPS, browser auth
gh auth setup-git      # register gh as git's credential helper

For Bitbucket / GitLab / Azure DevOps HTTPS remotes, use Git Credential Manager:

brew install --cask git-credential-manager
git-credential-manager configure

After either, git pull runs without prompting on matching remotes.

Host SSH agent (SSH remotes)

Repos cloned over SSH (git@bitbucket.org:…, git@github.com:…) bypass those credential helpers and need your host's SSH agent to have the right key loaded. Add a per-host block to ~/.ssh/config so macOS loads it on login:

Host bitbucket.org
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  UseKeychain yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Then once:

ssh-add --apple-use-keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa

To find which local key matches the fingerprint shown in your git host's UI:

for f in ~/.ssh/*.pub; do ssh-keygen -lf "$f"; done

DDEV SSH for private composer dependencies

composer update runs inside ddev, which uses a global, shared SSH-agent container. The tool runs ddev auth ssh for you once at the start of a real run (after the confirm prompt, before any repo work) so private GitHub composer sources resolve without per-repo setup. If your SSH keys have passphrases, you'll be prompted at that point. The step can be skipped if you've already loaded keys in this shell.

DDEV hostnames / sudo

The first time ddev starts a given project on this device it may need sudo to add the project's .ddev.site hostname to /etc/hosts. In a piped/parallel run that would hang forever on the password prompt — the tool watches for the trigger lines (needs to run with administrative privileges / may need to enter your password for sudo) and kills ddev immediately, then fails that repo with a hint telling you to run ddev start manually once and then retry.

GitKraken (for the open feature)

Uses the gitkraken://repo/path/<absolute-path> URL scheme via macOS open. No extra setup beyond installing the GitKraken app.