Working on a Drupal module using composer

So I needed the latest git checkout of the source code from external entities Drupal module. Its latest is 8.x-2.x

Using composer require drupal/external_entities is not enough as that will download the latest released version in this case 8.x-2.0-alpha1

Using composer require drupal/external_entities:8.x-2.x is not a valid version for composer as Drupal versions are not semantic versioned.

We should use as version 2.x which is a Drupal 8 compatible branch . SemVer can work with dev versions using 2.x-dev so using composer require drupal/external_entities:2.x-dev we get the latest dev. But still as zip

By altering composer.json setting a preferred-install for the module we finally get the latest git checkout.

"config": {
 "preferred-install": {
 "drupal/external_entities": "source",
 "*": "dist"
 },
 "autoloader-suffix": "Drupal8"
}

After running composer require drupal/external_entities:2.x-dev we get a git checkout but it is a detached head.

cd modules/contrib/external_entities
git status
HEAD detached at 809e275
nothing to commit, working tree clean

The final step is to do git checkout origin and you can create patches.

Refs

• Composer force git on stack overflow
• Get Drupal latest dev on Drupal answers @ Stack exchange.