Laravel: running artisan gives me "Unexpected character in input" error

Question

When I run php artisan list in my production environment (Debian Linux, private server), I get the following error:

Warning: Unexpected character in input:  
'\' (ASCII=92) state=1 in /home/user/app/artisan on line 46

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in 
/home/user/app/artisan on line 46

Why is that and how can I fix this?

Answer 1

So there's a parse error on this line:

$artisan = Illuminate\Console\Application::start($app);

The PHP parser didn't expect a \ there, which is used for namespaces, which were introduced in PHP 5.3, which means that you're running an older PHP version. You should update your PHP instalation to at least PHP 5.3.

My hosting company has both PHP 5.2 and 5.3 installed, so I just run:

/usr/local/php53/bin/php artisan migrate