Subdomain vs. Subfolder - Your Thoughts?

JasonLABS

I have been looking at these two options (Subdomain vs. Subfolder) while working on starting up a new community and wanted to hear from the Flarum community. I have found bits and pieces of discussion, but so far I haven't found a topic dedicated to this subject here. If there is one and I missed it, please direct me to it. 😅

So far I've found this article informative:
https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders
It seems to make sense to go the Subfolder rout for Search Engine purposes, but perhaps there is something I'm missing or not considering.

I noticed the makers of Flarum went with the Subdomain approach for the Discuss/Community and have the rest in a Subfolder structure. If possible, I would love to hear insights from them as to why they went that rout.

So, everyone, why did you pick the structure you did?

Thanks in advance for chiming in! I really appreciate everyone in this community. I've learned a lot from you all since being here.

clarkwinkelmann

Not sure which one is best from SEO, performance or I don't know what, but here are two of my observations:

Subdomain is easier to configure with the public folder approach of Flarum. So if you're looking for ease of installation, I'd definitely give the forum its own domain and update the webroot of that domain to the /public folder.

Second, if you're looking for statistics, The lab showcase https://lab.migratetoflarum.com/showcase is starting to get a nice list of production forums. I have not crunched any actual statistics yet but I think we can see a majority of flarum-dedicated domains or subdomains. But also a non-negligible number of subfolder installations, including the first on the list.

EDIT: if you're looking to split Flarum sections across subdomains, we do have this existing discussion

JasonLABS

clarkwinkelmann Thanks for the reply! I hadn't seen the lab link before. That's awesome!

Your comment sparked a thought for some reason...
could you set up Flarum in a subdomain: discuss.domain.com
with the file structure:
/path/to/discuss.domain.com/public/
(making the server root path be to the "public" folder)

...and then set up a domain/subfolder as: www.domain.com/discuss/
with file structure:
/path/to/www.domain.com/discuss/ with a symbolic link to /path/to/discuss.domain.com/public/

Then...
Inside the flarum config.php change the url from:
'url' => 'https://discuss.domain.com',
to
'url' => 'https://www.domain.com/discuss',

Would this break the session/mess with cookies?
Any other potential caveats?

When I have time I'll have to test it.

clarkwinkelmann

JasonLABS the best is to test ! There are many installation options if you're willing to change the Flarum skeleton a bit, it's been discussed in a few places on this forum. The complications created by using an aliased subfolder should only depend on your webserver software I think, as Flarum will always correctly once the webserver handles all requests for the application via index.php