Oct 1, 2012

If you are having problems installing Composer, using the method mentioned on their website:

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

You may get an error like the following (which will be because PHP CLI may have a different php.ini or not be present at all)

#!/usr/bin/env php
Some settings on your machine make Composer unable to work properly.
Make sure that you fix the issues listed below and run this script again:

The detect_unicode setting must be disabled.
Add the following to the end of your `php.ini`:
detect_unicode = Off

There are a few solutions online, but the easiest I found was on Stack Overflow. The problem is that the PHP CLI doesn’t load the same php.ini by default, and unlike on most Linux installations there isn’t a seperate php-cli.ini and seemingly /etc/php.ini.default doesn’t load so much. You can pass it as a runtime parameter though:

curl -s getcomposer.org/installer | php -d detect_unicode=Off

9 Comments

Phil jk November 16, 2012 at 6:29 pm

Thanks a lot, I was looking for this solution in the last couple of hours this evening.

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Rich Costello November 29, 2012 at 7:05 pm

Thank you for this solution. You saved me hours of possibly pulling my hair out

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pac December 18, 2012 at 10:43 pm

Thanks for this solution. Worked perfectly for me.

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Vinay January 22, 2013 at 10:34 pm

Life saver. Thanks a ton

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Andi February 3, 2013 at 11:10 am

THANK YOU, Works great!! Hats off

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Deacon February 6, 2013 at 8:46 pm

Thank you!

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PHPでいろいろハマる(@mac) | アドバンストコミュニケーションテクノロジー's Blog March 3, 2013 at 4:32 am

[...] でも、エラーになる。調べるとこれでイケそうなので、再度挑戦してうまくいく。参考リンク: Install Composer for PHP with detect_unicode = Off as a php.ini file does not exist [...]

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Ron March 22, 2013 at 3:51 am

You rock! Many thanks for this simple work around.

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J. April 6, 2013 at 1:02 pm

Indeed, very helpful!

Reply