How to install Laravel's Artisan?

Question

I want to create migrations in Laravel but according to the tutorials I need the Artisan CLI. The php command works fine and I'm on Windows. I type in php artisan or php artisan list and I get the following error:

Could not open input file: artisan

I wasn't able to find any guide in the documentation nor in Google. How can I install Artisan?

Answer 1

Use the project's root folder

Artisan comes with Laravel by default, if your php command works fine, then the only thing you need to do is to navigate to the project's root folder. The root folder is the parent folder of the app folder. For example:

cd c:\Program Files\xampp\htdocs\your-project-name 

Now the php artisan list command should work fine, because PHP runs the file called artisan in the project's folder.

Install the framework

Keep in mind that Artisan runs scripts stored in the vendor folder, so if you installed Laravel without Composer, like downloading and extracting the Laravel GitHub repo, then you don't have the framework itself and you may get the following error when you try to use Artisan:

Could not open input file: artisan

To solve this you have to install the framework itself by running composer install in your project's root folder.