phar-utils | PHAR file format utilities , for when PHP | Command Line Interface library

I solved it doing composer install instead of composer update.

Still no idea about why it didn't work, but at least it works now...

For people trying (as I used to) to do composer update in a context of production, don't:

What are the differences between composer update and composer install?

When to install and when to update

• composer update is mostly used in the 'development phase', to upgrade our project packages according to what we have specified in the composer.json file,

• composer install is primarily used in the 'deploying phase' to install our application on a production server or on a testing environment, using the same dependencies stored in the composer.lock file created by composer update.

And a nice diagram here.

A discussion about curl error was posted here for reference: SSH Curl doesn't work when URL is accessible in browser

For french developers using SSH with a shared hosting pro at OVH, the support says external calls like curl are disabled in ssh, but obviously I could do curl https://packagist.org/packages.json. When they tried themselves, they got an error like action forbidden or something like that. It doesn't make any sense.

It looks like your composer packages got out of sync.

To force a refresh delete the vendor folder also delete composer.lock and then run

composer install

It will download everything again, rebuild your vendor and make sure Phinx and Symphony are in sync again.

After you do this, you run your migrations again and see what happens.

This statement of yours

"I dropped all tables and hoped that it will just re-run the migrations as before."

worries me a bit, because the Phinx migration manger keeps its log in the database in a table called phinxlog (sometimes prefixed with a plugin name if you're talking about a plugin). If you deleted that then phix does not know what migrations did you run already and which ones are new. To fix this you may need to mark some of the earlier migrations are migrated so phinx does not attempt to do things that were already done.

Instead of setting a PATH value in the Windows environment variables I had to make a new variable called WP_CLI_PACKAGES_DIR and set the value of that variable to C:\Users\YOUR_WINDOWS_YOURSERNAME_HERE\.wp-cli\packages.

I also had to create the folder packages under C:\Users\YOUR_WINDOWS_YOURSERNAME_HERE\.wp-cli\. The folder was not created automatically.

Now I could install the wp-cli package just fine, ran it and it also worked perfectly.

https://make.wordpress.org/cli/handbook/config/#environment-variables