Force composer to require PHP Version between Version X and Version Y

I find it questionable to say the least that you are developing with the newest PHP available and are running production with a very outdated version. There will be plenty of possible problems arising from this, not only because of security patches that you would be missing, but more importantly because of PHP bug fixes that got introduced mostly in versions 5.3.9 and 5.3.23 that changes PHP behavior in some details pretty fundamentally. Not talking about the risk of accidentally using features of 5.4 or 5.5.

And there really is no way to make Composer deal with this situation. The PHP version that is used when running composer update determines the resolution of dependencies, being influenced by PHP version and installed PHP extensions.

You cannot define that a package should only be used for PHP versions between 5.3.3 and 5.3.5 if the PHP you are using for the update is not matching this version requirement. Because the used PHP version exceeds the upper version constraint, such a package is not eligible for fulfilling the version requirement, and Composer reports that no package has been found (not telling that it has seen the packages, but they had to be ignored because of the version constraint).

There are probably three obvious ways out:

1. Downgrade your development environment to the production version you are really using. If more than one is used: The oldest one. That way any requirements for PHP versions will be matched. Run composer update then, and you are done.

2. Upgrade your production environment. Needs no further explanation, but I have to mention that not only are you missing a lot of very nice PHP features, you are also missing a substantial performance increase, because PHP 5.5 is really that much faster than 5.3.

3. Add a "platform.php" configuration to either the global or project's composer.json. This will tell Composer to override the PHP version running Composer itself, and instead calculate the dependencies with that different PHP version. composer config -g platform.php 5.3.5 for global setting (will affect all further Composer runs), without -g for local setting (will only affect Composer operations in that project, in case you develop on more than one project with different production versions of PHP).

Since the config parameter in composer.json is available. You could something like this:

{
    "name": ".../...",
    "config": {
        "platform": {
            "php": "5.3.5"
        }
    },
    "require": {
        ...
    }
} 

https://getcomposer.org/doc/06-config.md#platform