Flarum Alternative?

louieakil

Would anybody know a good alternative to Flarum that works with AWS?

Installing Flarum has been the most frustrating thing I've dealt with. I've tried installing on Elastic Beanstalk and had issues, I tried installing on AWS ECS and have had issues, I've tried installing on a regular EC2 and have had issues.

Amazon is one of the biggest cloud services in the world, you would think there would be more support for it. I've successfully installed other forum software on AWS but Flarum is the hardest.

Could someone please suggest a Flarum alternative that is preferably open source.

[deleted]

louieakil Let's discuss this on Discord before you decide to leave our community please. I've helped many get their forums up and running (and have even build the environments for them, fully secured, hardened, and handed over), and getting one enabled on AWS EC2 is no exception - I have an AWS EC2 instance running flarum at work in exactly the same format.

Seek me out on Discord - phenomlab#4801

More than happy to help you get this off the ground.

IanM

louieakil likewise to @[deleted] - I'm also happy to help you.

We successfully run one of the largest currently in production Flarum communities completely inside AWS, running on Kubernetes. Happy to share any insights that may help you

askvortsov

Hey, sorry to hear this! Could you share a bit more about the issues you're having?

Mark73

As someone who doesn't have that much of technical skills, it was pretty simple to look for guides on the internet and follow them up to install Flarum. Maybe you could elaborate the issues you are facing so you could get further assistance

MikeJones

My flarum is running great on AWS, recieved a lot of support here for setting it up.

louieakil

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[deleted]

louieakil Also I noticed when installing Flarum on AWS ECS that Flarum dynamically generates file names in the assets folder. If you turn on the console in the browser and refresh the page several times, you will see that with each update index.php tries to download .js and .css files with a different hash in the name and gets 404 on them.

Are you using CloudFront by any chance ? If you are, disable it. This is going to cause you more headaches, pain, anger, tears, upset (I could go on...) that it is worth. CloudFront excels at caching resources but sucks with dynamic environments.

louieakil

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IanM

louieakil I guess it depends on what you're trying to achieve. My suggestion would be to spin up an EC2 instance based on Debian 10, install your LAMP stack and then follow the Flarum installation guide.

You will need to secure & harden it, just as @[deleted] mentions, but for a reasonably easy 'test setup', so long as your security groups are ok you should be fine. I would not put it into production however until you've done this.

If you're looking for load balancers, auto scaling, etc, my initial suggestion would be to read up on Kubernetes (k8s) to see what you will be up against. Also consider using a RDS cluster for your DB, and perhaps Redis too. It is a major undertaking to get it right, but the benefits are out of this world.