If you enable debugging in the app.php file, it will give you a more meaningful error message.

awkwardconcepts said:

If you enable debugging in the app.php file, it will give you a more meaningful error message.

HI awkwardconcepts. In my app.php file, it's set to:

'debug' => env('APP_DEBUG')

It sounds like debugging is already on? I don't know where to find the .env file to verify (it's not in the root folder of my laravel app folder).

Just an update - I'm pretty close to just giving up on Laravel entirely. I was really looking forward to learning Laravel, everyone raves about it. But that's a little difficult when I can't get the thing to even frickin start!

I followed the installation instructions TO THE LETTER on the official Laravel site: php artisan serve won't work (see above)

So then I decided to try the Homebrew instructions, since everyone is raving about Vagrant virtual boxes. Again, followed the instructions step by step, and nothing. Still getting error messages.

Then I went back to MAMP, which I was hoping would be as simple as my previous experience with XAMPP on Windows. I install it, everything looks ok. I install a Laravel project in the www folder. When I go to the public folder, it gives me yet another error message.

*sigh

Is it too much to want something that just works? I understand that there's always some configuration that needs to be done. But after spending literally 2 days straight staring at the computer trying to get past these errors to just INSTALL the frickin thing, I'm starting to see why people like Apple products... they JUST WORK.

/rant

I can understand your frustration, been there with the installation of Laravel on my Mac and I still am for some current projects that uses poorly documented packages :(

Anyhow, as I did follow a slightly different approach installing Laravel and you do (can) not provide much to go on, I will ask some questions to sort out main mistakes.

1. Would you mind running the following command in your terminal, it should establish whether you have mcrypt installed or not. By default it is not in Yosemite which leads to a lot of errors when installing Laravel, but because you have taken a differen approach... lets just check that quickly.

    mcrypt -v
   

2. I also quickly checked whether a database connection (MySQL) is necessary for the native Laravel installation and it is not. So, I have to ask: Did you install the native Laravel installation? Could you open ROOT/composer.json and post the line(s) "require", please?

3. Finally, I would also quickly check the PHP version. I do not remember whether I updated/changed it on my Yosemite or not, but in any case you need PHP 5.4+ (I have 5.5.14). Btw, if you use the php artisan serve command, the PHP version of your XAMPP or MAMP is irrelevant ;) It uses the PHP version of your Mac.

    php -v
   

4. How do you create a new project/instance of Laravel? I usually open terminal, go to the folder I want to create the new project (htdocs/ in my case with MAMP) and use the following command in terminal

    composer create-project laravel/laravel my-new-project-name
   

You say that you use the 'new' command, but this is a bit vague...

Don't give up on Laravel. Once you get it, you'll never look back :)

your .env file is in your project root. If you want to, temporarily, you can just change env('APP_DEBUG') to true.

awkwardconcepts said:

Don't give up on Laravel. Once you get it, you'll never look back :)

your .env file is in your project root. If you want to, temporarily, you can just change env('APP_DEBUG') to true.

It's worth noting that there is a sample '.env.example' file in the root. If you rename this file to '.env' your debugging will activated to work out what's going on.

If you didnt solve this yet I recommend to install PHP via brew (homebrew) see this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26493762/yosemite-php-gd-mcrypt-installation