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.