I have a bog standard composer.json that's exactly what you'd expect to see in a totally average Laravel app. This dev.json file provides a repository path that holds all my own packages.
composer install
- Generates my production-ready composer.lock file
comp install
- Generates my local composer.lock file that lets me work with the local copy of my packages
alias comp="COMPOSER=dev.json php -d memory_limit=-1 /usr/local/bin/composer.phar "