Laravel blank projects.. so many files! Can it be reduced somehow?

Last time I used Laravel was a long time ago and I decided to get back to it.

Now coming from CodeIgniter, which was a powerful framework in its own time, I was happy to upload projects to websites as the "system" folder containing the framework files contained only 121 files.

The problem with composer-based solutions however is that a tiny project can become huge, much bigger than a very large scale CodeIgniter project back in the days. All the dependencies have test folders, documentation, and tons of modules when sometimes only one method is used.

I gasped when creating an empty Laravel project using the instructions from the official documentation and seeing the "vendor" folder containing over 8,000 files!! (Not counting the folders) And it's doing nothing yet.. That is when using the --prefer-dist flag by the way.

So my question is if there is a way to have a more selective empty Laravel project, as servers often have limited Inodes and 8,000 files + folders for every project makes you reach the limit really quickly (and upload takes forever if you can't install composer on your server).

via Chebli Mohamed