installing laravel –prefer-dist

I am following the Laravel installation on their website and I came across this line

composer create-project laravel/laravel --prefer-dist

Now, what exactly does the --prefer-dist part mean? I can’t see anything on their documentation.

Thanks in advance.

Answer

It’s all available here: https://getcomposer.org/doc/03-cli.md#install

–prefer-dist: Reverse of –prefer-source, composer will install from dist if possible. This can speed up installs substantially on build servers and other use cases where you typically do not run updates of the vendors. It is also a way to circumvent problems with git if you do not have a proper setup.