New Laravel Project Throwing 500 Error: require(): Failed opening required autoload.php

I trying to learn laravel and I am attempting to set it up on my server.

I have meticulously followed all the instructions in this tutorial while changing some variables based on the names of my own directories: http://davidmyers.name/post/laravel-on-digital-ocean

The 500 error only is thrown when I visit the laravel project's public folder. When I attempt to visit any other page such as PHPMyAdmin or any other PHP or HTML page, the page pulls up just fine.

Is there anything I could be missing that is not included in the tutorial that I referenced? I double checked that I am following all the steps correctly.

Also, running composer update in the directory throws this error:

 [RuntimeException]
  Error Output: PHP Warning:  require(/var/www/html/testproj/bootstrap/../vendor/autoload.php): failed to open stream: No
   such file or directory in /var/www/html/testproj/bootstrap/autoload.php on line 17
  PHP Fatal error:  require(): Failed opening required '/var/www/html/testproj/bootstrap/../vendor/autoload.php' (include
  _path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in /var/www/html/testproj/bootstrap/autoload.php on line 17

I found this related stackoverflow article: Laravel 5 Failed opening required bootstrap/../vendor/autoload.php but the solution did not work for me, since my phpinfo() shows that OpenSSL is enabled.

Solution

It turns out that I was doing everything right, but when I went to run composer install I didn't see that it was throwing an installation error due to my server not having enough memory. Increasing my server's memory fixed the problem.