Accidentally Removed Vendor Folder in Laravel Project

Home Q&A Accidentally Removed Vendor Folder in Laravel Project

The `vendor` folder, located in the Laravel root directory, contains all project dependencies. These dependencies are managed by Composer, a PHP-based dependency management tool, and are included in the `autoload.php` file.

If ever you accidentally delete this vendor folder, there are two ways to recover the Vendor folder of laravel.

Using the Composer install command. :

Just Run composer install command in your project directory and vendor folder generated based on the current composer.lock file and composer.json file.

The Vendor folder is created by running composer install. It contains only the packages which you have asked composer to track in the composer.json file. If you have a composer.phar file in the root of your application run php composer.phar install.

Using the Composer update command. :

Just Run composer update command in your project directory and vendor folder generated based on the current composer.json file.

This command will also update your dependency if there is any latest update available for your dependency.

Recommended Way :

In most cases we must need to use composer install command because it will generate a vendor folder based on composer.lock and composer.json file. It will use the same version which is mentioned in composer.json file for your dependency.

Suppose you are using composer update command, it will also update your dependency to the latest version. So if one of your dependencies has an updated version available then this command will use that version for your dependency. And that dependency update needs a greater version for php and your project needs a lower version of php then it will create issues.

So the composer install command is preferable.