Composer Update failed — out of memory

Question

I got this error when running composer.phar update on my VM:

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 1073741824 bytes exhausted (tried t

Answer 1

Katiak's answer worked but I had to modify it. You will need 4 GB of free space for this to work on a Linux machine. Make sure you sudo the commands if you're not root:

/bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=4096
/sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1
/sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

Composer takes alot of memory for certain repositories like Drupal.

Essentially, this creates 4 GB of Swap memory from the hard drive which the CPU can use to complete the composer command.

The original solution seems to have come from this Github thread but I could be mistaken:

https://github.com/composer/composer/issues/7348#issuecomment-414178276

To load the swap at boot add the following line in /etc/fstab

/var/swap.1 none swap sw 0 0

You may want to backup your fstab file just to be on the safe side.

To reclaim the swap space do this:

sudo swapoff -v /var/swap.1
sudo rm /var/swap.1

If you get a message like this after turning on the swap...

swapon: /var/swap.1: insecure permissions 0644, 0600 suggested.

...change the permission if appropriate

sudo chmod 600 /var/swap.1