README

Composer Dependency Age

A Composer plugin that analyzes the age of your project dependencies and provides neutral categorization to help you understand your dependency landscape. No risk assessment - just clear, objective information about when your dependencies were last released.

Warning

This package is in early development stage and may change significantly in the future. I am working steadily to release a stable version as soon as possible.

Note

Understanding the age of your dependencies is crucial for maintaining a healthy codebase. While newer isn't always better, knowing when your dependencies were last updated helps you make informed decisions about maintenance, security planning, and technical debt management. This tool provides objective age categorization without making assumptions about what you should do - empowering you to prioritize updates based on your project's specific needs, risk tolerance and maintenance windows.

✨ Features

• Neutral Age Analysis - Categorizes dependencies as Current, Medium, or Old based on release dates
• Release Cycle Analysis - Analyzes dependency activity patterns with 4-tier activity rating
• Multiple Output Formats - CLI table, JSON for automation, GitHub-formatted for PRs
• Flexible Filtering - Analyze all dependencies or focus on direct ones only
• Smart Caching - Caches Packagist API responses with configurable TTL for better performance
• CI/CD Ready - Perfect for automated dependency auditing in your build pipelines
• Highly Configurable - Customize thresholds, ignore lists, and output preferences

🔥 Installation

composer require konradmichalik/composer-dependency-age --dev

📊 Usage

Command

Run the command to fully analyze your dependencies:

composer dependency-age

Command Line Options

Automatic Analysis

The plugin automatically runs after composer install and composer update operations, providing immediate feedback on your dependency landscape.

$ composer install

📝 Configuration

Configure the plugin via composer.json

{
  "extra": {
    "dependency-age": {
      "thresholds": {
        "current": 0.5,
        "medium": 1.0,
        "old": 2.0
      },
      "ignore": ["psr/log", "psr/container"],
      "output_format": "cli",
      "include_dev": false,
      "cache_ttl": 2592000,
      "event_integration": true,
      "event_operations": ["install", "update"],
      "event_force_without_cache": false,
      "enable_release_cycle_analysis": true,
      "release_history_months": 24
    }
  }
}

🧑‍💻 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

⭐ License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.