Migrate from Composer

Bougie mirrors many composer commands under the bougie composer command. For example:

bougie composer install # Install vendor/
bougie composer update # Bump a dependency
bougie composer require symfony/console # Add a dependency
bougie composer remove symfony/console
bougie composer dump-autoload

The recommended path

You don't have to change anything to get moving. bougie composer tracks Composer closely enough that your existing habits, scripts, and CI commands keep working with a bougie in front of them.

Once you've settled in, there's a shorter set of native commands worth learning. bougie offers them the way uv offers uv add next to uv pip install: a tighter surface for the things you do every day.

In Composer	The native bougie command
composer install	bougie sync
composer require symfony/console	bougie add symfony/console
composer require --dev phpunit/phpunit	bougie add --dev phpunit/phpunit
composer remove symfony/console	bougie remove symfony/console
composer show --tree	bougie tree
composer outdated	bougie outdated

There's one difference to know before you switch. When you add a package, bougie add writes a lower bound (>=6.4) where composer require would write a caret (^6.4). Both let you move forward inside the major version; the lower bound just records the minimum you've tested against and leaves the rest to the resolver and your lock file. There's a widely-cited essay on this from the Python packaging world: an upper cap is a guess about the future that tends to age badly, while a lower bound states what you have actually tested. If you do want a specific constraint, supply it with @:

$bougie add "symfony/console@^6.4"

To re-lock without pulling in newer releases, use bougie lock. It reconciles composer.lock against composer.json, holds every package at its current version where that's still valid, and re-resolves only what changed.

The escape hatch

You can always run composer using bougie with the bougie tool run or bgx command:

$bgx composer/composer create-project