Laravel 5 php artisan command not working at all

I have a Laravel project up and running. I cloned it to my laptop through bitbucket, but I DID use composer to install the dependencies. My problem is that php artisan commands won't work at all. It returns the error:

[Symfony\Component\Debug\Exception\FatalErrorException]  
parse error

I tried:

Running composer update

Deleting the 'vendor' directory and reinstalling it with composer install

I looked online and everyone with the same error solved it by running composer install. When i run that it returns:

Script php artisan optimize handling the post-install-cmd event returned with an error

Any help is appreciated.

OSX by the way.

from Newest questions tagged laravel-5 - Stack Overflow http://ift.tt/1riBYC2
via IFTTT