clarkwinkelmann As I described in my OQ, a Tag that labels guides to different versions of Flarum/OS/PHP (note there are specific versions which interoperate differently), would be ideal. Easier said than done but you have a hell of a lot of tryers in this forum and on Discord who give up because the installation is too lengthy (note, it's not difficult per se. It's problematic because IMHO the configuration is spread out over too many files, and these .conf files are expanding in number not reducing (see the latest GitHub additions)).
From a practical perspective installing Flarum on a managed server is massively faster and more convenient. At this point of time it might be the best advice to anyone new to Flarum. Installing onto a new VPS is a totally different proposition even if you know your way around Linux.
therealsujitk Thank you. I tried your tutorial. I am sure it did work when you wrote it. What I found was It didn't work this week on a Vultr VPS with Ubuntu 18.04, PHP7.4, et al.. I tried twice (for about one day each time.) The primary symptom was after the standard Composer installation routine, Nginx would deliver an octet-stream instead of firing up php. I can't say what the problem was because even after an exhaustive search and test, esp of .config files and php-fm, I couldn't track it down.
Reading the forum and noticing a number of single-symptom, multiple cause problems - for an example, search for "white page" - one might consider there to be a conceptual flaw in the architecture. I only point this out so the devs, who surely put in a hell of a lot of work, might give it some thought for future iterations.
In the meantime, is it practical to Tag installation guides to known versions of Flarum, OS, PHP, etc. so they can be easily identified by tyro admins?