This plugin allows to use repositories using the Git Flow workflow (or any other branching model) with Composer.

First you have to require the plugin.

$ composer require ichhabrecht/composer-git-flow-plugin

To define the repositories for which the plugin should change the used branch, it is necessary to require those with dev-master constraint.

{
  "repositories": [
    {
      "type": "vcs",
      "url": "[path-to-your-repository]"
    }
  ],
  "require": {
    "vendor/package": "dev-master"
  }
}

To select the branch your repositories should use, you have to call the composer command git-flow-update which makes sure only repositories with dev-master dependency constraints are updated. To specify the branch prefix use the option stability of the command.

$ composer git-flow-update --stability develop

If you want to checkout your repositories with the latest release branch you can simply set the stability to release. The plugin searches for any available branch with the stability prefix with a fallback to master branch if no other suitable branch was found.