Composer plugins issues when upgrading to Adobe Commerce 2.4.4

This article provides a solution to avoid issues with composer plugins when upgrading from Adobe Commerce 2.4.3 and earlier to Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 or higher (when future versions are released).

Affected products and versions

Adobe Commerce on premises, any version when updating to 2.4.4 or higher (when released)
Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure, any version when updating to 2.4.4 or higher (when released)
Magento Open Source, any version when updating to 2.4.4 or higher (when released)

Issue

When updating to Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 or higher after July 2022, you might get a warning from composer about plugins.

Steps to reproduce:

Prerequisites: Adobe Commerce 2.4.3 or earlier is installed.

Start the upgrade as described in Perform an upgrade.
Run the composer update command to upgrade the Adobe Commerce application.

Expected results:

Upgrade is successful.

Actual results:

Installation fails with an error similar to the following:

Writing lock file
Installing dependencies from lock file (including require-dev)
Package operations: 591 installs, 0 updates, 0 removals
  - Installing laminas/laminas-dependency-plugin (2.2.0): Extracting archive
laminas/laminas-dependency-plugin contains a Composer plugin which is currently not in your allow-plugins config. See https://getcomposer.org/allow-plugins
Do you trust "laminas/laminas-dependency-plugin" to execute code and wish to enable it now? (writes "allow-plugins" to composer.json) [y,n,d,?] y
Plugin initialization failed (require(app/etc/NonComposerComponentRegistration.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory), uninstalling plugin
  - Removing laminas/laminas-dependency-plugin (2.2.0)
    Install of laminas/laminas-dependency-plugin failed


  [ErrorException]
  require(app/etc/NonComposerComponentRegistration.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

Cause

After July 2022 Composer changes the default value of the allow-plugins option to {} and plugins will not load anymore unless allowed.

Solution

Add the following to your composer.json file, depending on how you installed Adobe Commerce:

If the project has been created using the composer create-project command:

"config": {
    "allow-plugins": {
        "dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer": true,
        "laminas/laminas-dependency-plugin": true,
        "magento/*": true
    }
}

If the project has been created by another way and does not have "dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-installer" in "require-dev" section:
```
"config": {
    "allow-plugins": {
        "laminas/laminas-dependency-plugin": true,
        "magento/*": true
    }
}
```

After updating the composer.json file, run the composer update command and restart the upgrade process.