louieakil you don't have to use the exact skeleton we provide (the install guide actually shows ways to modify it for "customizing paths"), but you will need most of what the skeleton provides anyway.
A Flarum forum must be a composer project, with one of its dependencies being core, and the other dependencies being extensions.
You are of course free to experiment with other ways to use the Flarum codebase, but we won't be able to provide support with that. The only official installation method is the one described on our install page, which is designed for VPSes and shared hostings with SSH access.
