Error "could not delete" with Composer on Vagrant

I have a Vagrant running Linux and I'm trying to install Symfony.

After the command composer create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition ./ "2.5.*" I have the error :

[RuntimeException]
  Could not delete ./.git/objects/pack/tmp_idx_llwUKb:

If I try to composer update another project, I always have this kind of error Could not delete

Any ideas?

Edit: For a simple sudo composer update -vvv on another project:

  - Installing sonata-project/admin-bundle (dev-master 8a022aa)
Failed to download sonata-project/admin-bundle from source: Could not delete /vagrant/crm_neo/vendor/sonata-project/admin-bundle/.git/objects/pack/tmp_idx_hchQhc:
Now trying to download from dist
  - Installing sonata-project/admin-bundle (dev-master 8a022aa)

Failed: [RuntimeException] Could not delete /vagrant/crm_neo/vendor/sonata-project/admin-bundle/.git/objects/pack/tmp_idx_hchQhc:



  [RuntimeException]
  Could not delete /vagrant/crm_neo/vendor/sonata-project/admin-bundle/.git/o
  bjects/pack/tmp_idx_hchQhc:



Exception trace:
 () at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Util/Filesystem.php:193
 Composer\Util\Filesystem->unlink() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Util/Filesystem.php:151
 Composer\Util\Filesystem->removeDirectoryPhp() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Util/Filesystem.php:129
 Composer\Util\Filesystem->removeDirectory() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Util/Filesystem.php:35
 Composer\Util\Filesystem->remove() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Util/Filesystem.php:80
 Composer\Util\Filesystem->emptyDirectory() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Downloader/FileDownloader.php:108
 Composer\Downloader\FileDownloader->doDownload() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Downloader/FileDownloader.php:89
 Composer\Downloader\FileDownloader->download() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Downloader/ArchiveDownloader.php:35
 Composer\Downloader\ArchiveDownloader->download() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Downloader/DownloadManager.php:201
 Composer\Downloader\DownloadManager->download() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Installer/LibraryInstaller.php:156
 Composer\Installer\LibraryInstaller->installCode() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Installer/LibraryInstaller.php:87
 Composer\Installer\LibraryInstaller->install() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Installer/InstallationManager.php:152
 Composer\Installer\InstallationManager->install() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Installer/InstallationManager.php:139
 Composer\Installer\InstallationManager->execute() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Installer.php:548
 Composer\Installer->doInstall() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Installer.php:217
 Composer\Installer->run() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Command/UpdateCommand.php:128
 Composer\Command\UpdateCommand->execute() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Command/Command.php:252
 Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command->run() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Application.php:889
 Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRunCommand() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Application.php:193
 Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRun() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Console/Application.php:135
 Composer\Console\Application->doRun() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/vendor/symfony/console/Symfony/Component/Console/Application.php:124
 Symfony\Component\Console\Application->run() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/Console/Application.php:84
 Composer\Console\Application->run() at phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/bin/composer:43
 require() at /usr/local/bin/composer:15

It happened once to me and it turns out that I was hitting composer's timeout.

You could take the following measures to gain some speed:

1. Increase composer process-timeout (default 300) (not really needed if the following settings will help you gain speed, but can't hurt)
2. Set dist as preferred install type.
3. Enable https protocol for github, which is faster.

~/.composer/config.json

{
    "config": {
        "process-timeout":      600,
        "preferred-install":    "dist",
        "github-protocols":     ["https"]
    }
}

If you still have problems after that, you can also clear composer's cache:

rm -rf ~/.composer/cache

I was trying to update project dependencies (using composer update) during a Laravel Framework upgrade exercise in my local Homestead environment (having run vagrant ssh to login as the default "vagrant" user) and none of the previous answers in this thread made any difference to the...

Could not delete /home/vagrant/projects/projectname/vendor/kylekatarnls/update-helper/src/UpdateHelper

...error message I repeatedly encountered.

The only thing that worked for me was to include a composer option as follows:

composer update --no-plugins

Plugins are used to alter or extend the functionality of Composer. The above command disables all installed plugins. Unfortunately, I'm not clear as to why this command worked for me, as I certainly haven't written any plugins myself. All I can conclude is that there was an erroneous Composer plugin installed that was causing this issue.

TL;DR Switch to Docker. It is the industry standard.

I came across this issue and spent quite some time doing research. I've tried every possible option to fix it but none of them worked for me. For me, the bug occurred on GNU/Linux host with Vagrant and VirtualBox provider.

It turns out it's a VirtualBox bug related to the file system layer and race conditions when creating/deleting files. It occurs only for VirtualBox shared folders, not for regular ones. The sad part is that it seems like it's not going to be fixed any time soon.

Some guys reported that they were able to solve the problem using the following tricks:

• Downgrading to VirtualBox version 6.0.4.
• Using nfs or rsync instead of shared folders.
• Patching composer to add some pauses after certain operations.
• Disabling plugin usage with --no-plugins option.

But all of this seemed dirty to me. I personally was able to use a workaround suggested on GitHub which is to configure composer to install packages from sources. That's a simple and kind of clean trick which should not have significant negative side effects on your workflow. Try putting the following config into your ~/.config/composer/config.json. Or instead you can edit your composer.json accordingly depending on your needs. Keep in mind that composer.json will override your global config.

{
    "config": {
        "preferred-install": "source"
    }
}

Just got the same issue.

I see the problem in accessing to some local files. In my case target directory was under "root" and I'm not the root user.

Solution

Change permissions/owner of your files/directory.

1. Redefine owner:

   sudo chown myuser:myuser -R /path/to

2. Maybe there is some lack of permissions for group which you are in.
   So, try to run:

   sudo chmod g+rwX -R /path/to

Or maybe you may run your command with "sudo" if it works for you (not recommended). :)

P.S. Never use 777. It's not secure.

UPD1

Another thing, you may found out useful to solve the root of the cause, to wrap up your composer binary to run it always behalf a certain user.

$ cat /usr/local/bin/composer
#!/bin/bash

# run composer behalf www-data user

set -o pipefail
set -o errexit
set -o nounset
#set -o xtrace

[[ "${DEBUG:-}" = "true" ]] && set -o xtrace || true

composer_debug=$([[ 'true' != "${COMPOSER_DEBUG:-}" ]] || echo '-vvv' )

sudo -u www-data -- /usr/bin/composer ${composer_debug:-} $@

I had this problem when provisioning the machine, which was bootstrapped to run composer install. I simply exited the VM and ran composer install on the code on my host machine and it worked.

So, if you're facing this problem while running Composer inside the VM, just try running Composer from outside the VM.

Update: As pointed in the comments below, this can pose some problems with different versions of packages being installed owing to the difference in system configurations between the local and Vagrant environments, so exercise appropriate caution while trying this.

We're running into issues also. There are several people who seem to have this issue, a fix has not been provided. For more information you can look into github issues of vagrant-winnfsd.

for my case, I only used the NFS folders type instead of the shared folders and it works:

folders:
    - map: ~/code/cs-cart-trial
      to: /home/code/cs-cart-trial
      type: "nfs"

Just run

sudo chmod -R 777 /folder/path

This will give you write access to the folder you are running composer in. I know this is an old post but this works so I have to share it.

In my case I was trying composer update but I got

> [RuntimeException] Could not delete .../vendor/bin/php-parse:

Despite I'm using Laravel framework, this question was the first link in Google, so I decided to post an answer.

My solution was to grant ownership for vendor: sudo chown -R $USER:www-data vendor/ and
sudo chown -R $USER:www-data composer.json

---

Update: my host OS was Ubuntu 16.04.

Having the same issue for Cakephp 4.2.1

Error:

> Could not delete /var/www/vendor/cakephp/plugin-installer/src:

Solution:

Based of https://stackoverflow.com/a/63139337/1110760

After trying out several options mentioned above, for me this was the easiest way to solve it.

> composer install --prefer-source

---

The argument --no-plugins worked as well, sort of. It skipped some packages but my localhost seemed to work just fine. This is faster, but it's missing some.

On AWS I got this error while deploying Yii framework project there was this

> /var/app/current/vendor/

folder i deleted everything inside it came back to my document root and ran composer update it fetched all the repos again.

In my case , by removing the plugin and re-create the box solve the issue.

For me it caused by composer's timeout. I checked my internet speed and found it dropped to 0.7M which is nearly unusable. After I reconnected the wifi and have my internet connection speed back to normal, the errors are gone.

This has something do to with the synchronization of the folders between host and guest OSes, the folder might be simply temporarily locked from your host machine.

The solution is simply to delete the offending .git folder from your host OS or reboot the machine and launch composer install again.

Ideally each OS has its own dependencies and different binaries, therefore you should isolate your /vendor folder out from the rsync/vagrant folder share, likewise you would do the same with /node_modules on a Nodejs project.

Another thing to check for, Composer needs to run in the context of a directory it has permissions to.

In my case I was trying to issue a create-project command from /var/www, aimed against /var/www/html. /var/www is owned by root, /var/www/html is owned by the same user I executed Composer as (www-data). I got the following error; Could not delete /var/www/html/:

Issued the same Composer command from within /var/www/html itself and it worked perfectly.

To me it helped to install a (new) version via command line from download homepage https://getcomposer.org/download/. I can exclude some file permissions as I was root with chmod +R 0777, though I had virtualbox mounted drive. Anyway since new version worked, would mean it was version, or running a new version via php phar, and the original bin belonged to root

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === '48e3236262b34d30969dca3c37281b3b4bbe3221bda826ac6a9a62d6444cdb0dcd0615698a5cbe587c3f0fe57a54d8f5') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

I have solved the problem by creating a mount : In /home/vagrant create a folder named vendor then apply command : mount --bind /home/vagrant/vendor /path/to/source/vendor

It's a bit unrelated with the question, but in my case with Docker. It was failing because Webpack was watching and it didn't allow other files to be deleted.

It worked when I turned off Webpack.

I had same problems trying composer install

- Installing aws/aws-sdk-php (3.218.3): Extracting archive
Install of aws/aws-sdk-php failed

In Filesystem.php line 330:

  Could not delete /home/vagrant/code/my-project/vendor/composer/cefa44c2/aws-aws-sdk-php-a1bd217/src:

What I did I comment it out

type: "nfs"

from my homestead.yaml

and make a fresh vagrant provision

I'm using Oracle Virtual box 6.1 on Windows 10.

Best hack i found was to replace the unlink commands with the one below. I am running ubuntu.

sudo nano +219 /usr/share/php/Composer/Util/Filesystem.php

exec("sudo rm -rf $path"); return true;

For Windows users

Wow, I can't believe how long it took me to realize this, and sadly it has happened multiple times, and I'm finally writing this note so that I and others can quickly recover next time.

1. Just use Windows Explorer to go delete the /vendor/whatever_project_name folder instead of trying to delete it from the Vagrant command line.

2. Then run composer update to reinstall the dependencies.