In the present paper, we develop an SL(2, R) Lie-group shooting method for a regular or singular phi-Laplacian in a nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE). By using the closure property of the Lie-group, one-step Lie-group transformation between the boundary values at two ends is established. Hence, we can derive a closed-form formula in terms of r is an element of [0, 1] to determine the missing left-boundary condition by matching the right-boundary condition through a few iterations. The present method is easy to numerical implementation with a cheap computational cost. Numerical examples are examined to show that the present SL(2, R) Lie-group shooting method is effective to treat the regular and singular phi-Laplacian with a high accuracy. (C) 2012 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.