Help Installing on Cloudways in 2019

JaceBarnett

I've read of people here who have installed Flarum on Cloudways. I also read a poorly written and outdated article on how to do it hosted on Cloudways itself. I haven't had any luck installing Flarum no matter what method I have tried though.

I first tried installing it locally using XAMPP and struck out about 6 or 7 times (fixing an error using Google Fu only to discover another error behind it) before ultimately giving up. I was fine with that, since the only reason I was doing so locally was to act as a workaround for testing on a shared host that didn't supply SSH access. Pockethold was a bust, so I decided to use YouTube tutorials to go local and then migrate to hosting afterwards.

When that failed, I wondered why I was trying so many temporary installs and workarounds when my ultimate goal was to install Flarum on Cloudways anyway. So after wasting the better part of 4 days, I decided today I was going to get it setup on Cloudways. I started that process 10 hours ago, and I'm starting to believe that Flarum just isn't meant to be installed for me.

The most frustrating part is that I think there's a chance that it might have worked, but I guess the first time I tried the server was set to PHP 7.0. I learned that I needed to use PHP 7.1, so I attempted to use information from the forum here to clear cache, delete files, and attempt installation through SSH using "php flarum install" when the Browser option failed. Even when removing everything, new attempts to install brought about the old error "[InvalidArgumentException] Project directory ./ is not empty"

I fought with that for awhile, before I decided to just build a new server on Cloudways, be sure to set it to PHP 7.1 and start over again. I was a bit shocked and dismayed to find that after starting with a brand new server, I still received the "Project directory ./ is not empty" error.

Is there anyone out there who has installed Flarum on Cloudways within the last 6 to 8 weeks that can give a little help? If I can get it to work, I would be glad to do a screen recording and narration tutorial for those to come after. I'll even commit to keeping it updated with each new iteration of Flarum.

clarkwinkelmann

JaceBarnett hello and welcome ! Sorry to hear all the trouble this has caused you.

I suppose you get the Project directory ./ is not empty error when you run the composer command. This means the target directory for that command isn't empty (surprise!)

The docs suggest you navigate to en empty directory (using cd /path/to/dir if necessary) and run the command

composer create-project flarum/flarum . --stability=beta

The dot indicates to install in the current directory.

You could also not navigate to the directory and specify the folder path instead of the dot:

composer create-project flarum/flarum /path/to/empty/folder --stability=beta

If this is indeed the correct path, make sure there's nothing in the target directory. You may delete and re-create it, or look for invisible files by running ls -lA in the directory.

I'm not familiar with Cloudways but maybe share what path you're trying to use for installation ? Is there a preconfigured webserver folder or are you creating your own folder, in /var/www or /home maybe ?

shahroze-nawaz

Hi JaceBarnett,
hope you are doing good.

I'm Shahroze, PHP Community Manager at Cloudways. Jace, thanks for pointing out the mistakes in the article written at Cloudways blog. The article was written long ago and since then flarum has got so many core and feature updates.

At the time when this article was written Cloudways have PHP 7.0 version and Flarum was working perfectly on it. Now, You can launch multiple version on Custom PHP servers including 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3. I personally installed Flarum on my testing server with PHP 7.1 and MySQL 5.7 and the forum is working perfectly.

The article is also updated and contains the live demo URL so that you can test it 🙂
Blog URL: https://www.cloudways.com/blog/install-flarum-forum-on-cloud-hosting/
Demo: http://phpstack-71265-797157.cloudwaysapps.com/

The process of installation is much easier at Cloudways. You just need to run composer command on the root folder and the add DB credentials in further installation steps in browser.

I hope the updated blog will help you in setting up Flarum at Cloudways 🙂

Regards
Shahroze

Hari

Hi, shahroze-nawaz i have tried to install using same article i am facing few errors could you tell me where i am missing.