Laravel - Model Class not found

I had the same error in Laravel 5.2, turns out the namespace is incorrect in the model class definition.

I created my model using the command:

php artisan make:model myModel

By default, Laravel 5 creates the model under App folder, but if you were to move the model to another folder like I did, you must change the the namespace inside the model definition too:

namespace App\ModelFolder;

To include the folder name when creating the model you could use (don't forget to use double back slashes):

php artisan make:model ModelFolder\\myModel

Laravel 5 promotes the use of namespaces for things like Models and Controllers. Your Model is under the App namespace, so your code needs to call it like this:

Route::get('/posts', function(){

        $results = \App\Post::all();
        return $results;
});

As mentioned in the comments you can also use or import a namespace in to a file so you don't need to quote the full path, like this:

use App\Post;

Route::get('/posts', function(){

        $results = Post::all();
        return $results;
});

While I'm doing a short primer on namespaces I might as well mention the ability to alias a class as well. Doing this means you can essentially rename your class just in the scope of one file, like this:

use App\Post as PostModel;

Route::get('/posts', function(){

        $results = PostModel::all();
        return $results;
});

More info on importing and aliasing namespaces here: http://php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.importing.php

I was having the same "Class [class name] not found" error message, but it wasn't a namespace issue. All my namespaces were set up correctly. I even tried composer dump-autoload and it didn't help me.

Surprisingly (to me) I then did composer dump-autoload -o which according to Composer's help, "optimizes PSR0 and PSR4 packages to be loaded with classmaps too, good for production." Somehow doing it that way got composer to behave and include the class correctly in the autoload_classmap.php file.