Using composer and drupal, even d7, is great. But an update or install can leave you with a broken drupal registry. So here is a workflow that is pretty bullet proof. In this example drupal’s composer folder where composer.json lives is located in /var/www/drupal/sites/default/files/composer So in there is composer.json and composer.lock So when you need to install a new composer library and you updated your json file you can run