Laravel Installer Now Returns JSON When Running Inside an AI Agent

Laravel Installer v5.27.0 adds support for AI agent environments. When laravel new detects it's running inside an agent, it suppresses interactive prompts and decorative output and prints a single line of structured JSON to stdout instead.

The change comes from Joe Tannenbaum, and it covers the two things an agent actually needs to know: did it work, and if not, why?

A successful run produces:

{
    "success": true,
    "name": "my-app",
    "directory": "/Users/you/code/my-app"
}

On failure, the output includes the error message, a path to the full installer log, and a tail of that log — enough context for an agent to understand what went wrong without having to chase down a temp file:

{
    "success": false,
    "name": "my-app",
    "directory": "/Users/you/code/my-app",
    "error": "Composer installation failed.",
    "log": "/tmp/laravel-installer-abc123",
    "tail": "..."
}

Detection happens automatically through a new Agent class that checks for environment variables set by common AI coding tools, including Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Windsurf. No flags to pass or configuration needed — the installer figures out the context on its own.

For agentic workflows the agent runs the command, reads the JSON result, and either continues or handles the error — without trying to parse terminal output that wasn't meant for it.

PR: laravel/installer#508