Renaming and moving core folders

Hi So I know that this might be a stupid question to ask, but I do it anyway. I am building a CMS for fun, using Laravel 5.1.x. The goal is to be able to give this to a person who every little experience with web application deployment, so someone who might only have deployed a few wordpress sites, and they should be able to download the files from the release branch in my git repo and then upload it to a hosting account on a shared server and then just supply DB credentials and hit a URL in the browser, and then the application does the rest. For this to work, I need to move everything, aside from the public folder into a subdirectory. This part is easy, but how does composer handle this? I still need to be able to update my dependencies from the terminal on my dev machine, but users should be able to run this in shared hosting accounts where there is no access to SSH or any other way to execute terminal commands like php artisan or composer install.

Does anyone have experience with this kind of work and are willing to share some knowledge about this?