Composer install fails: SSL: Connection reset by peer

Just do a manual download then.

Not knowing your OS but if it's Linux chmod the file with sudo chmod +x composer.phar and them move it to usr/local/bin with mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

It sounds like php does not have a valid path to ssl certificates. You can download curl ssl certificates here:

https://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html

And you can read about configuring PHP with the certificates here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35197412/ssl-error-at-composer-install

If you want to avoid installing composer manually, you could do one of the following:

Windows:

Try using the Windows installer, that will handle everything for you.

MacOS

You can install composer with brew: https://gist.github.com/shashankmehta/6ff13acd60f449eea6311cba4aae900a

Linux

You should be able to install via the distros package manager, for instance: apt-get install composer

Here are the developments.

Tried to fix ssl for composer install

I've downloaded ssl certificates from here: https://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html Then I've enabled/added the following lines in php.ini:

extension=php_curl.dll

extension=php_openssl.dll

curl.cainfo = /Users/benelaci/Sites/__files/cacert.pem

openssl.cafile = /Users/benelaci/Sites/__files/cacert.pem

The ssl connection still fails when I try to run composer-setup.php : SSL: Connection reset by peer

Then I tried a different approach:

Tried to install Composer with Homebrew

Note: I have OSX 10.10, because of which I got a warning from Homebrew that it's too old, and there might be failures.

Although composer.phar does get downloaded, it remains in Homebrew's cache directory, instead of being placed to /usr/bin.

Moving the file manually didn't help. When I tried to install Laravel, composer.json was missing for Composer to run.

I got one seemingly marginal error message from Homebrew while trying to install Composer:

Error: An exception occurred within a child process:

NoMethodError: undefined method `source' for nil:NilClass

Looks like I'm draining all possibililites, but I'm still hoping for a resolution.

Thanks for reading all this, and for the help.

Have you thought about using something like Homestead or Valet

Homestead would take away a bunch of your headaches, whereas Valet might not. You can read about the differences here: https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/valet#valet-or-homestead