I am trying to deploy a Laravel 4 app, but artisan is not showing any commands. Why?

Question

I've deployed a Laravel 4 app to a shared host for the first time and run composer install, but it fails with the message:

Script php artisan clear-compiled handling the post-install-cmd event returned with an error

    [RuntimeException]
    Error Output:

        [InvalidArgumentException]
        Command "clear-compiled" is not defined.

When I run the command php artisan list I don't get the expected list of artisan commands, only:

Available commands:
    help              Displays help for a command
    list              Lists commands
    workbench         Create a new package workbench

All the dependency files are properly installed in the vendor folder.

Why are Laravel's standard artisan commands not available?

Answer 1

The problem was that the php command on my host machine was not running the CLI version of php. When I run the command php-cli artisan list then I get the expected list of Laravel artisan commands.

To get composer to call this properly, then, I just had to update the 'scripts' section in my composer.json to use php-cli instead of plain php.

(As a side note, composer had been spitting out a similar warning with this message: Warning: Composer should be invoked via the CLI version of PHP, not the cgi-fcgi SAPI)