Laravel Forge Deployment -- Repo Requirements

MisterMaul

Hi All,

I wanted to make a suggestion for the software.

I have been working on installing the software through Laravel Forge. As a larger discussion point, I am working to integrate this app into a Laravel app, and intend to publish an up-to-date guide with my findings once done.

Now, onto the issue at hand: Repository structure.

The way you have to deploy applications to Forge is through a git repo -- no problem. I just initialized my repo after installing flarum. Suggestion: Add .gitignore into core repo that ignores /vendor folder. I quickly did this and deployed to the server.

After deploying to my server, I was getting a nasty file_contents_missing error. Not sure if it was file_contents_missing but it was file_contents_ somthing

After about an hour of troubleshooting, I realized the error: my "storage" directory and my "public/assets" directory were missing. Now this may have been obvious to more advanced server admins, but this was a really tough issue for me to diagnose. Please note, my nginx config had been in place and I was doing a clean install -- so there was really very little for me to troubleshoot.

SOLUTION: Since GIT does NOT track empty directories, you have to MAKE it track your directory if it's empty. To do this, I added an empty .gitignore file to every directory in "storage" and in my "public/assets" directory.

BAM! Solved! Installation proceeded as normal from there 🙂

I would recommend adding the .gitignore files to the default repo, to help support an installation from a git repo. Happy to hear feedback on this suggestion. Thanks for the great software!

clarkwinkelmann

MisterMaul hi! Have you been using the correct repository for your Flarum install ?

When following the "official" installation instructions, you download https://github.com/flarum/flarum through Composer which serves as the Flarum skeleton (not flarum/core !).

If you clone the flarum/flarum repo directly, I think you'll find all the things that were missing.

However if you download it through Composer or GitHub ZIP, the .git* files are removed because of our gitattributes rules. The public and storage folders should always be present though.

I know multiple websites already manage their Flarum forum via Composer and it seems to work fine when using a copy of flarum/flarum as the base 😃

MisterMaul

clarkwinkelmann Hi Clark, thanks for the response.

I was using the composer recommended installation method, so I did not receive those files. I wasn't sure of the distinction between flarum/flarum & core, so I erred on the side of caution and went with the recommended repo. That being said, in the future I will use the "flarum" repo as my main source.

Lessons learned, thanks for the clarification! 🙂

clarkwinkelmann

MisterMaul glad I could help and thanks for sharing feedback!

flarum/flarum is the skeleton which is usually installed through Composer's create-project but that's not an absolute requirement. It was a choice to not include git related files when downloading through Composer, probably to keep it simple or have as few files as possible.

flarum/core is the main codebase, which gets installed as a requirement from the skeleton. So it gets installed in the vendor folder along with the remaining of the dependencies.

Doing things this way means that there's very little that might need editing by hand during an update. There have been occasional changes to the skeleton, which we always document in the update instructions.

MisterMaul

clarkwinkelmann Gotcha, makes sense. I figured composer was including the core files, and on preliminary investigation in vendor it looked that way. Another reason why I didn't think starting with the flarum/core repo was the way to go.

I guess a follow-up question for you: If I want to make changes to any of the core files(creating any extensions for example), should my repo be the "flarum/core" base repo?

Thanks for your responses!

clarkwinkelmann

MisterMaul ideally you'll want to make your small local changes via the extend.php file that's at the root of the skeleton. From that file you can modify Flarum using the Extension API https://flarum.org/docs/extend/

Another option is to make your changes into an actual extension (public or private) and require that extension through composer.json.

For extension development, take a look at using a workbench folder. We've got useful links to get started here https://discuss.flarum.org/d/1662-extension-developer-first-read

If you absolutely need to make changes to Flarum core, the solution would be to fork core and then install that fork via Composer. But this should be the last resort as this makes updating Flarum way more difficult.

MisterMaul

clarkwinkelmann Roger that, makes sense. Thank you very much!