Hopefully we'll get Flarum to not need Composer 'till the end of the year.
However, I see the success of Flarul tightly tied to weither or not they manage to get rid of the Composer dependency fast enough. After all, most of the small to medium forums owners are using a shared hosting account. And if you don't get to the masses fast enough, you'll lose your headstart.

    Sapioit Yes, as Flarum is still in beta, there are some things that aren't ideal. A web installer is on the roadmap and should be possible by the time the stable version is out. Don't worry.

        jordanjay29 By the way, is there any chance I can get my hands on a instance of Flarum already installed (I mean the files and the database), so I can try my luck at making a web installer?

            Sapioit If you want to try and make a web installer, you should install flarum locally using composer and work on it there.

                Davis I have no idea how to do that. Do I need a virtual machine with linux? I have VirtualBox and my pc can handle it, but I haven't used composer before so it's a bit out of hand, for me. It'd be more comfortable to wait a few days (that I'd wait anyway, since the finals aren't over, for me, yet) in case someone does posts a archive with the files and sql of a system already installed, and if nobody would do that, I'll just figure it out myself.

                It's just that for the people that have the stuff already installed, it's easier to just deploy another instance of flarum, but for me it would take time to figure things out, so I'm trying my luck here. It shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes, for deploying another instance of flarum, if you have the enviroment already in place, right? For me it would take a few hours to research how to install and use Composer + what linux do I need + other seemingly unimportant stuff. And that hours can be used to make the installer, instead of only figuring out how to install Flarul the way it can be installed currently.

                    Sapioit You would want to create a virtual machine ruining linux. Then install per the instructions.

                    It shouldn't take any research about composer as all the commands are written in the instructions. I'd recomend you download Ubuntu server with LAMP.

                        Davis It would still take about an hour or more to install centos and yum update && yum upgrade composer and get Flarum patched. Will do when I get the time. (If I don't forget, in the meanwhile... I tend to do that quite often, and stuff gets postnoted indefinetly...)

                            Sapioit Just realized this: you wont be able to create an installer without an in-depth knowledge of composer.

                                Davis So you mean Flarum is entirely based on Composer? Such anticoruption layer, much inexistent, it seems. So the vendor lock-in is a real problem, for flarum... and I tought it learned from the mistakes of esoTalk...
                                (Yes, I'm a programmer, so I understand what I just said.)

                                    Sapioit

                                    Sapioit but I haven't used composer before

                                    Sapioit Such anticoruption layer, much inexistent, it seems. So the vendor lock-in is a real problem

                                    Don't you think these statements contradict themselves?

                                            Flarum is currently in beta
                                            Because of this, there is less focus on making installation accessible to everyone and more focus on making development easier.
                                            There are and will be bugs that aren't identified yet. These same bugs require that the user be able to appropriately investigate and debug to report to dev's the issue. Shared hosting accounts do not always have access to vital debugging tools like error logs of webservers - making fixing these issues that much more difficult to resolve and hindering bug fixes.

                                            Sapioit So the vendor lock-in is a real problem, for flarum...

                                            This makes no sense. Flarum is freely accessible on github. Composer is simply the designated method of delivering files and coordinating dependencies and is freely accessible as well. Doubt and uncertainity posts like this are not constructive.
                                            It's been established that a web installer is planned to be available when a stable release is out. This is the time for people who want a convenient, easy install to take advantage.

                                                Kulga I understand what you mean. Thank you for explaining me.

                                                Davis

                                                @Sapioit but I haven't used composer before

                                                @Sapioit Such anticoruption layer, much inexistent, it seems. So the vendor lock-in is a real problem

                                                Don't you think these statements contradict themselves?

                                                No, they do not. I wasn't talking about the anti-corruption layer of Composer, but about that of Flarum.

                                                      Sapioit Perhaps you should look at Flarum's code before making assumptions of how it's structured based on the fact that it depends on composer.

                                                          Davis Probably. I was assuming the vendor lock-in because it was said time and again that there will be no Composer-free installer untill the end of beta. I will look at the code before makind a similar statement again.

                                                            This is getting very off-topic, folks. If you'd like to comment about Flarum's use of Composer, feel free to start a new topic in the Dev tag.

                                                            I've been personally been working on a web installer that circumvents the need of composer and ssh. You'll find the last attempt as pr of flarum/flarum.

                                                              5 days later

                                                              Is there a timeline on when we won't need command line anymore? I tried getting Namecheap to try to install it and they said they couldn't figure it out.