composer | laravel 5 - Updating dependencies but the framework itself

I am using pre-beta release of Laravel 5 for my project.

I found out that the app skeleton of Laravel 5 was changed in the github repo and since it is a development version, that is expected to change quite frequently.

My question is, can I update only the specific dependencies using composer and not the framework itself? So that I don't have to worry about the changing app structure until I am ready to make changes?

Here is how the composer.json dependencies look:

    "require": {
        "laravel/framework": "~5.0"
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "phpunit/phpunit": "~4.0",
        "way/generators": "~3.0",
        "fzaninotto/faker": "~1.5@dev"
    },

Thank you.

While the composer update package package ... answer is a good one, another thing you might be able to do is change your Laravel require spec to a specific commit. The Composer documentation mentions how to do this, and I've done it myself on a project (though not with laravel, on my own packages which are also in a breaking/dev state).

"require": {
    "laravel/framework": "dev-master#49e3c77b518547bb661b1de4fda64a3ae0c5c505",
    ...
}

I'd hope that, because laravel/framework 'replaces' the various illuminate/* packages, that any reliance on these (as long as the spec is 5.0-esque) that this would work without downloading the illuminate packages twice.

Doing it this way you can lock your laravel/framework (or any package) at a given commit, but still allow the standard composer update to work.

To find out what commit you're already on, if your laravel/framework dependency spec is a dev one then the vendor/laravel/framework/ directory itself should be a git repo, so just do git status in there to get the HEAD ref. Alternatively, look in composer.lock for the laravel/framework entry's source.reference value.

Composer allows you to do specific package upgrades. I used this literally the other night to upgrade a single package to fix a bug, but I didn't want to change anything else.

composer update <package1> <package2> <...>

So in your case

composer update phpunit/phpunit way/generators fzaninotto/faker

It might be more complicated when you have lots of packages - but it is a solution that works.

Yes, you can simply call