Is it possible to re-generate the vendor/craftcms/plugins.php file?

[mmikkel]

On a few different sites, I've got some plugins that are long-since uninstalled, but that still appear under Settings -> Plugins in the CP and in the list generated by php craft plugin/list.

These plugins were both Composer-uninstalled and Craft-uninstalled at some point, but for some reason Craft never removed their references in the vendor/craftcms/plugins.php file, which is the reason why they still show up.

For reference, here's how these plugins appear (note the missing icon since their Composer packages are no longer in vendor):

As these are very old sites and I haven't seen the issue crop up on newer installs, I don't really care how this happened. But, I would like to update the plugins.php file somehow, removing any references to the non-existent plugins.

I've tried running php craft plugin/uninstall {handle} --force and also hitting the "Remove" button in the CP, but neither method updated the plugins.php file. I also tried deleting the plugins.php file in the hope that Craft would re-generate it on pageload; it doesn't and the site dies.

I assume re-installing and re-uninstalling the relevant packages would do the trick, but since there are several dependency conflicts with currently installed plugins, this is not a feasible solution either.

Apart from manually editing the plugins.php file or nuking the vendor folder, is there any way to make Craft re-generate it from scratch and/or purge references to the uninstalled plugins? (I tried to figure out how and when the plugin installer initially creates that file, but I couldn't spot it in the source 🤷)

[brandonkelly]

That file is generated by the craftcms/plugin-installer Composer plugin, which registers a new installer type for craft-plugin packages.

There’s no way to get it to run outside of composer update/install/remove.