About output of composer outdated command

At the top of the report should be the following:

Color legend:
- patch or minor (red) release available - update recommended
- major release (yellow) available - update possible

A patch/minor release means that if you run composer update, it will update the package to the newest minor release within the same major version. Eg: Laravel 11.15.0 could be updated to 11.16.0. This would be in red. Both here are Laravel 11.

But if you were running Laravel 10, you might see something like this: Laravel 10.48.14 could be updated to 11.16.0. This would be in yellow.

Going up a major version will not be done automatically. You would need to specify the major version you want to install by editing the composer.json file or specifying the version in the composer update command.

@PetroGromovo You can run composer upgrade which will do a minor update of all your packages. Your json file will need to have a ^ before the version number to allow it (it probably does, it does this by default when you install something).

Eg: "laravel/framework": "^11.0". This means that any time you do composer update, it will update the version of laravel to the latest version of V11. You won't see a change in composer.json, but your lock file will have the specific version that should be installed. Keep in mind that it won't upgrade to V12 when V12 comes out (which is a good thing - see below).

When you want to do a specific package you can also do composer upgrade <packagename>.

You could make your composer.json file set up so the above command also upgrades major versions, but since major versions have breaking changes this is usually a BAD IDEA. (see The Death Star Version Constraint). This is when manually editing your json file is a good idea because it shows you mean to do it.