An artisan executable to store under the bin/ directory for easy artisan commands and easy installation of an instance of Laravel 4 for creating new projects.

artisan

#!/bin/bash

if [ -f "./artisan" ]; then
        php artisan "$@"
else

        if [ "$1" == "new" ]; then
	
				if [ ! `which git` ]; then 
					echo "For this installer to work you'll need to install Git."
	                echo '        http://git-scm.com/'
				fi
				
                git clone -b develop --recursive git://github.com/laravel/laravel.git "./$2";
        	cd "$2";
                git reset --hard HEAD

                # Do the house cleaning
                chmod -R 0777 app/storage
                if [ ! "./composer" ]; then
                    echo "Composer not detected. Fetching it..."
                    curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=bin
                    echo "Composer now available as a command."
                fi
        		composer self-update
        		COMPOSER_PROCESS_TIMEOUT=4000 composer install
                php artisan key:generate

        else
                echo 'This is not a valid laravel installation so artisan is a bit lost.'
                echo '        http://laravel.com/docs/install#installation'

        fi
fi

Nice!