Core Updates after install with composer create-project drupal/drupal

Question

So I installed Drupal with composer create-project drupal/drupal <...>

It works fine, but now I'm trying to update core from 8.4.1 to 8.4.4 What's the right way to do that? composer update only updates the modules, not core. How do I update core? I don't know that much about composer, but if I edit the composer.json and remove

"replace": {
    "drupal/core": "^8.4"
},

and add

"require": {
    "drupal/core": "^8.4",
    ...
 }

it seems to work. Is this the right way to do this? If so, why is this not in the default composer.json, that comes with the project?

Answer 1

You do in fact want to remove the drupal/core declaration (as it exists) in the replace section of composer.json, and then add the entry as you noted to the require section. Then run composer update drupal/core --with-dependencies.

You can find Drupal's official process for a Core upgrade with composer here: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/update/update-core-via-composer-option-4