Issues while installing Composer and requiring frameworks

February 16, 2022

I am setting up a small dev environment.

Ubuntu 20.04
PHP 7.4.3
Composer 2.2.6

I have Composer installed.

 Composer version 2.2.6 2022-02-04 17:00:38

I am attempting to require php-jwt. I run composer require firebase/php-jwt. When I do this, I get the following error:

[Seld\JsonLint\ParsingException]
    "./composer.json" does not contain valid JSON
    Parse error on line 1:
    
    ^
    Expected one of: 'STRING', 'NUMBER', 'NULL', 'TRUE', 'FALSE', '{', '['

When I cat composer.json in my working directory, there is nothing in it. Are there default options that should be in composer.json?

*UPDATE

Thank you to @Moshe Katz

The fix:

Delete existing composer.json
Run composer init

>Solution :

You cannot have composer.json as an empty file, because an empty file is not a valid JSON object. (At a minimum, a valid JSON object looks like {}.)

Delete that file and run composer init to set up your project properly, or manually create it as a valid file following the documentation. (I recommend the init command over manual creation, because it will ask you a series of questions to help build the file.)