When you dont have an automated deployment system setup and you push code to the production server you will need to manually run all the task runners, namely Composer.
All the articles you read will tell you to never run composer update on a production server but why? and why does it not warn me?
I've always thought the Linux way of everything auto-updating for you, albeit after asking you first, was the best way
forward so it always felt kind of wrong having to run composer self-update manually.
What better tool is there to periodically run a script than cron. It's as simple as adding the following to a file
located, at least on Ubuntu, here: /etc/cron.daily/composer
#!/bin/sh
# Update Composer to the latest version
composer self-update
It's probably a good idea to redirect the output to a log file with a timestamp but i'm not that worried. Composer complains at you if it's older than 30 days anyway:
Warning: This development build of composer is over 30 days old.
It is recommended to update it by running "composer self-update" to get the latest version.