Composer

Drupal 11.4 brings one of the most significant developer experience improvements in recent years: a built-in command-line interface that can discover commands provided by Drupal modules.

Until now, Drupal Core included a limited CLI (core/scripts/drupal) that only supported a handful of core commands. Most developers relied entirely on Drush for command-line workflows.

Introduction:
When working on Drupal projects, installing and updating dependencies is a crucial step. All external modules and libraries are managed using Composer. The --prefer-dist option helps speed up this process and ensures more stable installations.

What --prefer-dist Does

Composer can fetch packages in two ways:

The command

composer require drupal/module_name

is used in Drupal to install a new module or package into your Drupal project using Composer.

Here, `drupal/module_name` should be replaced with the actual name of the module you want to install. For example, if you want to install the "Views" module, the command would be:

The command `composer update --dry-run` is used to perform the process of updating dependencies in a project, but without actually changing any files or installing updates. The `--dry-run` option (or `-n`) instructs Composer to simulate the update, showing which packages will be updated without making actual changes to the `composer.json` files or installing updates.