Tag: laravel

Installing / updating Composer dependencies is very slow or time outs

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I wanted to speed up my coding by adding Laravel 4 Generators and Laravel Artisan plugin for Sublime text 2 (you can learn more about this here). I added "way/generators": "dev-master" to my composer.json file as instructed and ran "php composer.phar update" and waited….and waited…and waited. How can downloading simple text files be so slow when I have very fast connection?

For some reason I always had problems with composers speed – installing or updating dependencies was very slow. By searching net I saw that a lot of people have similar problems and various solutions are offered – for some they work and for some they don’t. I would advise you to try them out and see if any of them help you.

One of the most common advices is to use the --prefer-dist switch:

php composer.phar update --prefer-dist

I ran it however it didn’t help me. Composer got stuck on updating symfony/filesystem dev-master. After 5 minutes I got this error:

[Symfony\Component\Process\Exception\RuntimeException]
The process timed-out.

After trying it few times with the same result I realized that git.exe was having some problems with my network (not sure what). So the problem seems to be with Git protocol, at least in my case. Composers default github-protocols config settings is ["git", "https", "http"]. So what I did was changed github-protocols to https with this command:

php composer.phar config -g github-protocols https

I ran the update again and it started working, much faster and no timeouts.

Note: I don’t know if this was due to me canceling composer updates several times but after composer finished updating I got this error for the first time :

Fatal error: Call to undefined method Illuminate\Foundation\Application::getConfigLoader()

The solution for this can be found here.

ReflectionException: Class SomeClass does not exist – Laravel 4

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Note: This post was written while Laravel 4 was still in beta.

When you add a new class (controller) in Laravel 4 you will most probably get

ReflectionException: Class SomeClass does not exist

SomeClass is of course the name of your new class.

Why does this happen? The file/controller is there, the class is there – it works in Laravel 3 so why doesn’t it work in Laravel 4?

The reason for this is that because of the performance reasons Laravel 4 (beta) has a static list of all classes that need to be autoloaded. Since you added your new controller Laravel doesn’t know about it yet. Hopefully this will be automated in the future but right now what you need to do is open your command prompt and type this (on Windows):

 >composer dump-autoload

If you get 'composer' is not recognized as an internal or external command error or Could not open input file: composer then use this version (also go to your project directory where composer.phar is located):

 >php composer.phar dump-autoload

Composer will (re)generate autoload files and your new controller will work.

Warning: file_get_contents(): Unable to find the wrapper “https” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?

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I was installing Composer via CLI terminal for a new Laravel project and got this error:

Warning: file_get_contents(): Unable to find the wrapper “https” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP? in Command line code on line 1

The solution is easy: Open php.ini file (mine is located in xammp/php/php.ini ) and add (or uncomment) extension=php_openssl.dll in the list of Dynamic Extensions. Restart Apache and it should work.

Laravel Redirect redirects URL to index.php

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One of the first things that I do when I start using a new framework (CodeIgniter, Laravel etc) is to remove the default index.php from the URL.

When you install Laravel and you want to remove index.php from the URL simply do this (If you are using Apache, make sure that mod_rewrite is enabled):

Create .htaccess file in your public directory and add this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
     RewriteEngine on

     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

     RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

Many developers do this and forget that there is another step. Everything works fine until you use Laravel’s Redirect class, for example:

return Redirect::to ('someurl');

This redirects you to index.php/someurl instead of someurl.

What you need to do is to open application/config/application.php file and you will see this on the line 42:

'index' => 'index.php'

Remove index.php so it becomes

'index' => ''

Save the file and now you have a cleaner, nicer URLs without the index.php.