Is it possible to remove extension installed via composer without composer?

Question

I've got a problem with a website that i have inherited from another developer, it's Magento 2.3.2 with quite a few extensions installed... The majority of the extensions are installed at /app/code - so manually installed via FTP but 1 extension is installed at /vendor - so installed via composer and the server doesn't have composer installed?

I am guessing the previous dev started work on the site on a server with composer and then moved it to a server without composer... anyway the 1 extension in the /vendor folder (a Sagepay payment processing extension) is causing problems and needs updating or removing and the new version installing via FTP - but how??

Answer 1

You can use composer just by adding the composer.phar file to your project root directory (where composer.json and composer.lock is located).
Then you can use it like this:

<path_to_project_root>/composer.phar remove VendorName/VendorExtensionRepository

Before that you should disable the extension by using the Magento built-in command line commands:

php bin/magento module:disable <ExtensionProvider_ExtensionName> --clear-static-content
php bin/magento setup:upgrade

Here you can find further information.

• Tony Ryan: That's the confusing thing - site already has a composer.phar file in the root but 'composer --help' returns command not found (so no composer installed on the server?)
• michi-p: Instead of composer --help try ./composer.phar --help (in the directory of the .phar file)
• Tony Ryan: Thanks Michael - yes that worked... I'll try the un-install now
• michi-p: You're welcome! Don't forget to accept the answer if it worked for you :)
• Tony Ryan: Hi Michael I've accepted your answer as it should have worked fine but unfortunately I got errors about another extension when I tried to remove the payment extension (git not found error I think) and things went pear shaped from there... I did however bite the bullet and just overwrote the files in /vendor/<module name> with the updated files and ran setup:upgrade and it seemed to work.. not ideal but will do for now as the site in question is due a full upgrade / rebuild. Again many thanks