Flarum with www. but not without...

gavinsmith

...or vice versa.

I've spent hours getting Flarum to work and at last I'm (almost) there! I renamed the public folder to forum so that the URL looks like this: www.domain.com/forum

I can access the forum from either domain.com/forum or www.domain.com/forum but only one works properly at a time. In my config.php file, if I have 'url' => 'http://domain.com/forum', the forum works without the www subdomain just fine, and I can login as admin. But if I immediately go to www.domain.com/forum, I see the forum, but I'm logged out and I can't log in!

If I change the config.php file so that the URL includes www, then www.domain.com/forum works, but domain.com/forum doesn't!

I hope that makes sense. Basically, I'd like to be able to access the site from either www.domain.com or domain.com. It's obviously a configuration issue, but I've no idea what to adjust next. Any ideas?

clarkwinkelmann

gavinsmith it's the expected behavior. You should only access the forum via the url defined in config.php.

You should setup redirects so that the alternate urls are redirected to your canonical url. You can achieve it with rewrites in Apache/Nginx or if you are not comfortable with modifying that config you can also take a look at the Canonical url extension.

Also PS: you should configure HTTPS and make sure the url in config.php is your HTTPS url 😉

And second PS: make sure your public renaming does not expose the files from the Flarum root folder. You should most likely follow the instructions to remove the public folder https://flarum.org/docs/install.html#customizing-paths, then place the whole Flarum folder in the forum subfolder. You can scan your forum with the lab to make sure no sensitive file is exposed.

gavinsmith

Thanks so much, all sorted now.

And that tool at https://discuss.flarum.org/d/10056-migratetoflarum-lab-the-health-scanner-for-flarum helped avoid further newbie questions from me, great work 🙂

debynory

Hi, is better with www or without www? What's the difference?

[deleted]

debynory A shorter address to type. Most hosts these days will acept both the hostname itself and a prefix of www. I personally dropped the www prefix years ago.