Quick fix: Composer path length error on Windows

So you did a composer install/update and got this error:

Composer error: ZipArchive::extractTo(): Full extraction path exceed MAXPATHLEN (260) 

The cause for this is the annoyingly small path length limit in Windows API, which is so easy to hit.

A simple fix would be to instruct Composer to use GIT to fetch the source instead of the main Packagist repository. Just run composer with a “prefer-source” flag:

composer install --prefer-source

Now composer will use GIT to get the sources instead of downloading zip archives from Packagist. Just be aware that it will make the process considerably slower.

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