Common Laravel 7 Installation Errors and Their Solutions

Many developers encounter cryptic English error messages when installing Laravel, especially version 7, so this article collects the most common installation problems and provides concrete solutions.

1. Install Laravel via Composer

// Set a Chinese mirror for faster downloads (optional)
composer config -g repo.packagist composer https://mirrors.aliyun.com/composer/

// Create a new Laravel project
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog

After the project is created, generate a unique application key: php artisan key:generate Then you can access the application, for example: http://www.example.com/index.php 2. Required PHP extensions

PHP >= 7.2.5

BCMath, Ctype, Fileinfo, JSON, Mbstring, OpenSSL, PDO, Tokenizer, XML

If any extension is missing, create a phpinfo.php file in the web root and browse to it to verify which extensions are loaded.

3. 403 Forbidden errors

In Linux, edit /usr/local/nginx/conf/fastcgi.conf and comment out the last line that disables certain functions, then reload Nginx.

4. Dependency version conflicts

Typical Composer errors look like:

PHP >=7.0.0 required but your PHP version (5.6.27) does not satisfy that requirement.

Solution: upgrade PHP to at least 7.2.5 (or the version required by the package).

5. Cache problems

Make sure the storage and bootstrap/cache directories exist and are writable, then clear the cache: php artisan cache:clear 6. Permission errors (e.g., cannot write to storage ) chmod -R 777 storage Adjust permissions according to your security policy.

7. Migration errors

When running php artisan migrate you may see:

PHP Warning: require('/server/web/test_api/vendor/autoload.php'): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

Fix: run composer install first to generate the vendor directory, then run the migration command again.

8. Out‑of‑memory errors

If PHP runs out of memory during installation, the only practical solution is to increase the server’s memory or upgrade the hardware.

By following these steps and checking the listed requirements, most Laravel 7 installation issues can be resolved quickly.