I am currently working with symfony2 and I want to launch to download the libraries I need. I know the command in linux is "$ ./composer.phar update --dev" however when I run this in windows it prompts whether I should open the file with the windows explorer or not. I currently have composer.phar installed on windows but I am having trouble launching it. How would I be able to update my symfony2 folder with the dependencies I need. Thank you.
The problem is that Windows don't know how to open .phar files. You need to execute them using php interpreter php composer.phar update and the php interpreter(php.exe) must be accessible on PATH.
You could use command php -v to check if your php is accessible from command line.