Composer windows installer

Question

I want to install composer on windows to start using laravel, but I encounter the following issue when running the windows installer:

Composer Error [ERR_DOWNLOAD]: Composer was not downloaded

Clicking retry does not resolve the issue. I'm running WAMP and I have enabled open_ssl in the correct php.ini and can see from phpinfo() that it's enabled. I'm trying to understand how to complete the manual installation, but I'm not understanding the steps outlined here properly: https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md#manual-installation

Do I need to add php.exe or composer to my system variables before I follow through the instructions in the link above?

Answer 1

A point for WAMP users to be aware of: WAMP has a task bar widget that has a UI to enable/disable various extensions in the php.ini. However this php.ini file is located under the Apache installation in WAMP. If the PHP installation directory is in the PATH environment variable, the php.ini file used by the command line instance of PHP is NOT THE SAME as the php.ini file used by the Apache installation in WAMP. In order to run the Composer installer you must edit the php.ini file that is under the PHP installation directory.