Laravel 4 requires PHP 5.3+

A quick little gotcha from this morning while trying to deploy a new Laravel 4 app:

Warning: require(__DIR__/../bootstrap/autoload.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/development/public_html/index.php on line 21

Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required '__DIR__/../bootstrap/autoload.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/development/public_html/index.php on line 21

It's not immediately obvious, but the reason is because __DIR__ is a magic contstant that is only added in PHP 5.3. I was accidently trying to deploy Laravel 4 on a PHP 5.2 server, where the server requirements of Laravel 4 actually include PHP 5.3.7+.

It's probably also worth noting that at the time of this article, PHP 5.3 is reaching it's end of life (EOL). If you're provisioning new servers, make sure you hook it up with at least 5.4!