To install Laravel using composer, all you need to do is to run in your terminal is:
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog
Where: blog is the name of the folder containing your new Laravel instance.
To install Laravel directly within your chosen directory (not in a folder within it as demonstrated above), simply run the same command but this time without a folder name as in:
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel
Remember to run the command within your desired directory for the project; in your case, for C:\xampp\htdocs\, then, run either the first or second command as above base on your needs.
This assumes you already have Composer properly installed as recommended on their website.
Before you try addressing your failed to open stream: error, do avoid having folder names with space(s) as in your command above (obviously not the source of the error).
Make sure you have the correct Server Requirements for Laravel
the failed to open stream: error usually occur when the OpenSSL PHP Extension not enabled.
- PHP >= 5.6.4
- OpenSSL PHP Extension
- PDO PHP Extension
- Mbstring PHP Extension
- Tokenizer PHP Extension
- XML PHP Extension
After enabling the required extension(s), do remember to restart your server, then run the following command:
composer update