Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.
Did anyone encounter this issue before? I'm running a Laravel 7 app in production in Forge, it's working fine earlier and now the site came down and the logs contain these errors:
Error #1
production.ERROR: Uncaught ReflectionException: Class translator does not exist in /home/forge/site.com/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Container/Container.php:809
Error #2
production.ERROR: require(): Filename cannot be empty {"exception":"[object] (ErrorException(code: 0): require(): Filename cannot be empty at /home/forge/site.com/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Support/ServiceProvider.php:83)
I'm running
Laravel Framework ^7.24
PHP 7.4
The site is now up again because I tried this answer from StackOverflow. But can anyone explain why I got that error? I have no idea.
Answer from SO
Run composer dump-autoload to fix this kind of issue.
Make sure your .env file is properly written, no hidden space in front. Also make sure APP_KEY is generated. php artisan key:generate
So that error just happened all of a sudden? You sure you didn't ran composer install or installed something new on the server?
The composer dump-autoload is used just to re-create the classmap to all the vendor/packages you have included. So it caches for faster lookup.
@Nakov Yes you're right the happened all of a sudden. I've installed it without error through the deployment of Forge. I'm sure I did not install anything I just composer install after a few hours that error popped out.
@benjamin1509 okay, so after few hours you noticed it, it is not that it appeared then all of a sudden. So after you run composer install make sure you do the composer dump-autoload too. So you won't see that error, unless really the package and the filename is missing.
@Nakov I did not run composer install just the dump
@benjamin1509 You said this
I'm sure I did not install anything I just composer install after a few hours that error popped out.
So I am not sure what happened really. But that error won't popup by itself. For composer dump-autoload to work, it means that you had installed something previously which had to be missing from the cached classmap.
@Nakov Maybe that happened because I update my php version in my composer.json before pushing to GitHub.
@benjamin1509 there you go. Anytime you change composer.json and in your deployment script on Forge I am sure you have this:
$FORGE_COMPOSER install --no-interaction --prefer-dist --optimize-autoloader
so that's how it gets installed. :)
@Nakov you're right! I have that what could be the issue?
@benjamin1509 :D You are kidding me, or you read what I am saying. When you run composer install there is a class map created with all the packages for quicker lookup.
So when you run again, new package is installed, and the class map is old. You run composer dump-autoload to re-create the classmap.
@Nakov Thank you
Please or to participate in this conversation.