Installing Laravel using Composer through PhpStorm

Question

I have checked out many examples of this but for some reason, either I am missing an assumed step or I'm just doing it wrong.

So I am having issues getting Laravel installed locally. I have a composer.json and .phar file.

I have ran php composer install which downloaded the dependencies. However, this is where it gets different. Seems at this point all the examples I have found are magically working. However in mine, I have a vendor directory with all the dependencies but nothing is actually installed. I have the Laravel source but its not ready for development yet.

Does this make sense? Am I over complicating things?

I am now getting an error:

Script php artisan optimize handling the post-update-cmd event returned with error code 1

which after checking, that method is there...

My composer.json:

{
"name": "laravel/laravel",
"description": "The Laravel Framework.",
"keywords": ["framework", "laravel"],
"license": "MIT",
"type": "project",
"require": {
  "php": ">=5.6.4",
  "laravel/framework": "5.4.*",
  "laravel/tinker": "~1.0",
  "barryvdh/laravel-cors": "^0.8.2"
},
"require-dev": {
  "fzaninotto/faker": "~1.4",
  "mockery/mockery": "0.9.*",
  "phpunit/phpunit": "~5.7"
},
"autoload": {
  "psr-4": {
    "App\\": "app/"
  }
},
"autoload-dev": {
  "psr-4": {
    "Tests\\": "tests/"
  }
},
"scripts": {
  "post-root-package-install": [
    "php -r \"file_exists('.env') || copy('.env.example', '.env');\""
  ],
  "post-create-project-cmd": [
    "php artisan key:generate"
  ],
  "post-install-cmd": [
    "Illuminate\\Foundation\\ComposerScripts::postInstall",
    "php artisan optimize"
  ],
  "post-update-cmd": [
    "Illuminate\\Foundation\\ComposerScripts::postUpdate",
    "php artisan optimize"
  ]
},
"config": {
  "preferred-install": "dist"
}

}

Answer 1

It looks like you may have downloaded Laravel itself instead of creating a Laravel project.

The Installing Laravel section of the documentation shows two ways to create a Laravel project:

Via Laravel Installer

First, download the Laravel installer using Composer:

composer global require "laravel/installer"

Make sure to place the $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin directory (or the equivalent directory for your OS) in your $PATH so the laravel executable can be located by your system.

Once installed, the laravel new command will create a fresh Laravel installation in the directory you specify. For instance, laravel new blog will create a directory named blog containing a fresh Laravel installation with all of Laravel's dependencies already installed:

laravel new blog

Via Composer Create-Project

Alternatively, you may also install Laravel by issuing the Composer create-project command in your terminal:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog

After doing either of these your project directory should include the proper Laravel directories with all dependencies properly set up.