PHP Composer update "cannot allocate memory" error (using Laravel 4)

Looks like you runs out of swap memory,try this

/bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024/sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1/sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

as mentioned by @BlackBurn027 on comments below, this solution was described in here

php laravel laravel-4 composer-php

As composer troubleshooting guide hereThis could be happening because the VPS runs out of memory and has no Swap space enabled.

free -m

To enable the swap you can use for example:

sudo /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024sudo /sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1sudo /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

Or if above not worked then you can try create a swap file

sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfilesudo chmod 600 /swapfilesudo mkswap /swapfilesudo swapon /swapfile

php laravel laravel-4 composer-php

A bit old but just in case someone new is looking for a solution, updating your PHP version can fix the issue.

Also you should be committing your composer.lock file and doing a composer install on a production environment which is less resource intensive.

CodeHunter