Troubleshooting PhpStorm – entire composer.json file shows as invalid

If you’re running the latest PhpStorm (2018.2.2 at time of writing) you might have a composer.json file that’s turned entirely yellow recently, even though it’s valid.

This happens when your composer.json has a “description” key and is due to this bug.

Workarounds:

  • Disable the inspection on the file
  • or remove the “description” temporarily