Laravel 4 Artisan not working at all

Question

Just playing with Laravel 4 for the first time after using version 3 for a few projects but can't seem to get Artisan to work at all. I've done a bunch of searching and followed the troubleshooting steps I could find but no luck.

• I've got Mcrypt installed
• I had no bootstrap/compiled.php file to delete
• I have the latest version of the framework from Github
• I am on the latest version of Composer

When I try "composer update" I get this error:

Script php artisan optimize handling the post-update-cmd event returned with an error: 

...with no extra information.

Trying to run "php artisan list" or any other artisan command just gives me no output at all.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

To summarise the discussion in the comments, we discovered that adding logging at the php.ini level revealed a PHP error that was not reported by the Composer console interface. I wonder whether you had installed Composer as root, and so some critical files required by Laravel were effectively invisible for a non-privileged user.

Answer 2

After running phpinfo, I noticed "--disable-mbregex" was part of the PHP configuration, meaning PHP was not compiled with the mbregex extension. My error logs were showing "Call to undefined function mb_regex_encoding".

Once PHP was recompiled with mb_regex_encoding, the issue went away.

Answer 3

If you are missing the /bootstrap/start.php file, you don't get helpful error messages from artisan and composer responds the same way. I went around and around trying solutions I found online and ultimately discovered this file was missing. I was back online as soon as I replaced it. I discovered this file was missing in my PHP error logs and artisan wasn't generating logs since it was unable to run.

Answer 4

I had a similar problem. Even the command $ php artisan --verson would not produce any output. Turned out, I had some code under app/start/global.php which was breaking under the CLI execution (but not breaking on the web side).

So that's another place to check for stuff! ( app/start/global.php )

Answer 5

I was getting this problem, and it was because the subdirectories of storage did not yet exist.

Of course, these directories are created by the project-creating script, but they're quite easy to leave out of source control and so will be missing on a freshly cloned project. The .gitignore files are in there for a reason it would seem!

Answer 6

This problem occurred for me when there were files in the storage folder that were not writable for the current user. php artisan silently failed, without output. Changing permissions helped.