I’m on Windows. I have a Laravel 6 / Vue 2 app, and it was working fine using XAMPP with php 7.4.29. (I am running mentioned projects with php artisan serve)

I then wanted to run an open source project that is using Laravel 8. It didn’t work with php 7.4 and required me to use php >= 8.1. So I deleted the existing XAMPP folder, and installed XAMPP 8.2.12, and was able to get the OS project working.

I subsequently uninstalled XAMPP 8.2.12, and then extracted (from archive) the XAMPP/php 7.4.29 that I had used previously. Now, the Laravel 6 app is no longer working. (The Vue app doesn’t load).

So I created a test Laravel 6 / Vue 2 project from scratch, and it also is not working properly. The Laravel welcome page loads, however, the Vue object does not load, and also bootstrap does not load). So I added some test traces to try and see what is happening:

• In resources/js/app.js (the Vue app file) I added console.log("special text");
• In publc/js, I added a file myapp.js which just calls console.log('my app');.
• I added a test.blade.php page (and route at /test) which uses the layoutsapp.blade.php – where the Vue script is called.

So in app.blade.php, I have these lines:

<!-- Scripts -->
<script src="{{ asset('js/app.js') }}" defer></script>        // has trace: console.log("special text")
<script src="{{ asset('js/myapp.js') }}" defer></script>   // has trace: console.log('my app')

When I load the test page (localhost:8000/test), the console shows my app, but not special text.

Now comes the strange part. I look in the dev tools Network page. The app.js and app.css that are being served, have different sizes to those of the same name files in the public/js & public/css folders, and on inspection, I see that the contents are also different. They are the contents of this other project (Laravel 8), which is in a totally different path on Windows. (The app.css is using Tailwind css!!..) So it seems to me, that php artisan serve, is somehow stuck on serving these other pages. I’ve tried calling php artisan cache:clear, however that does not affect the problem.

As mentioned the Laravel 6 and Laravel 8 OS projects are in totally different folders on the PC.