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PHP Error: Unable to load dynamic library 'gd'

Currently installing Laravel on my Arch Linux.

I got PHP, MySQL, Apache and Composer installed and trying to install Laravel with this:

$ composer global require laravel/installer

 But got this instead:

PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'gd' (tried: /usr/lib/php/modules/gd (/usr/lib/php/modules/gd: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory), /usr/lib/php/modules/gd.so (/usr/lib/php/modules/gd.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)) in Unknown on line 0 PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'openssl.so' (tried: /usr/lib/php/modules/openssl.so (/usr/lib/php/modules/openssl.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory), /usr/lib/php/modules/openssl.so.so (/usr/lib/php/modules/openssl.so.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)) in Unknown on line 0 PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'phar.so' (tried: /usr/lib/php/modules/phar.so (/usr/lib/php/modules/phar.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory), /usr/lib/php/modules/phar.so.so (/usr/lib/php/modules/phar.so.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)) in Unknown on line 0 PHP Warning:  Phar::mapPhar(): open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/usr/bin/composer) is not within the allowed path(s): (/srv/http/:/home/:/tmp/:/usr/share/pear/:/usr/share/webapps/:/etc/webapps/) in /usr/bin/composer on line 28 PHP Warning:  require(phar://composer.phar/bin/composer): Failed to open stream: phar error: invalid url or non-existent phar "phar://composer.phar/bin/composer" in /usr/bin/composer on line 29 PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Failed opening required 'phar://composer.phar/bin/composer' (include_path='.:') in /usr/bin/composer:29 Stack trace: #0 {main}   thrown in /usr/bin/composer on line 29
And so I have six errors and I'll be going through all of them one by one. I decided to document it here as a journal which can serve as a note for the future.

First up is the "Unable to load dynamic library 'gd'". 

This means "there's something wrong with gd.

What can we do?
  1. Back up libgd.so first.
  2. Restart server and install again
What is libgd.so? It's a GD Graphics library in a shared object file
  • lib is for library
  • gd is for GD Graphics or GIF Draw graphics
  • .so is an extension name for shared objects file
So the error message is saying that it's unable to load the shared object. I checked the folder and it's not there. Next is to download and install: 

$ sudo pacman -S php-gd

Then restart httpd.service.

Installed Laravel again and the error message is gone, but not all. 

So on to the next one.
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