Get PHP Packages Which Depend on Certain Package using Composer

Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP that allows developers to easily manage and install packages required by their projects. It provides a straightforward way to discover and install packages based on their dependencies. Sometimes, there may arise a need to get PHP packages which depend on certain package using Composer. This tutorial shows how to do that.

The composer depends command can be used to find PHP packages that rely on a particular package. For example, the following command prints PHP packages that have a dependency on the symfony/string package:

composer depends symfony/string

Composer analyzes the installed packages in the project and checks their dependencies. It specifically looks for packages that have a requirement or dependency on the symfony/string package.

The output of the command displays a list of packages that depend on symfony/string, along with their version constraints.

symfony/console       v5.4.19 requires symfony/string (^5.1|^6.0) 
symfony/property-info v5.4.19 requires symfony/string (^5.1|^6.0)