How to install latest stable Drupal version from drupal/recommended-project branch? I've forked drupal/recommended-project and run composer install from the default branch (8.8.x), it installed the latest dev version (8.8.6-dev). There's also a tag 8.8.5 (latest stable as of now) which has the same composer.json with the exception of these lines:

    "require-dev": {
        "drupal/core-dev": "^8.8"
    },


I've deleted these lines in branch 8.8.x hoping this would install the latest stable version but it installed the dev version anyway. I don't want to use tags because I forked the upstream and have my own changes.

How can I install the latest stable version of Drupal from the default branch (8.8.x)?
Instead of forking and running composer install, you should run composer create-project drupal/recommended-project &lt;project_root_dir&gt;. This will install the latest stable version of Drupal and you can of course add this to your version control system (don't forget to exclude all files that you don't have to track in your VCS).

When you use the composer.lock file from the GitHub repository directly, Composer installs the software versions as defined in the lock file (in this case the development versions).