I cannot install Laravel with Composer (ext-zip extension is missing)

I tried to install Laravel with Composer on my Debian 9 terminal with

composer global require laravel/installer

But I get the following errors:

Using version ^3.0 for laravel/installer
./composer.json has been created
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.

  Problem 1
    - laravel/installer v3.0.1 requires ext-zip * -> the requested PHP extension zip is missing from your system.
    - laravel/installer v3.0.0 requires ext-zip * -> the requested PHP extension zip is missing from your system.
    - Installation request for laravel/installer ^3.0 -> satisfiable by laravel/installer[v3.0.0, v3.0.1].

  To enable extensions, verify that they are enabled in your .ini files:
    - /opt/lampp/etc/php.ini
  You can also run `php --ini` inside terminal to see which files are used by PHP in CLI mode.

Installation failed, deleting ./composer.json.

I tried to install the PHP ext Zip extension with:

apt-get install php7.4-zip

and

apt-get install php-zip

and also edit the php.ini file uncommenting the following lines:

extension=php_zip.dll
extension="zip.so"

But nothing works and I have the same errors...

Solution

Make sure to restart the webserver after the change
php -m to list the compiled modules
it happened to me once (on plesk) that composer was using a different php version than to use php itself
You could try php composer.phar(the location of that) and check the results

If Installing laravel is what matters here

here are some possible solutions

composer create-project laravel/laravel [dir]
or git clone https://github.com/laravel/laravel.git then cd to that directory, usually laravel, so cd laravel then composer install