Composer for Flarum

notakoder

Just a quick question.
I have installed composer from the official debian repos and have been using it for other projects. Is this composer not enough to install Flarum? When I execute composer create-project flarum/flarum . I get the following errors,

Creating a "flarum/flarum" project at "./"
Installing flarum/flarum (v1.0.0)
    Failed to download flarum/flarum from dist: /var/www/forum/vendor/composer does not exist and could not be created.
    Now trying to download from source
  - Syncing flarum/flarum (v1.0.0) into cache
  - Installing flarum/flarum (v1.0.0): Cloning d5b2515f54 from cache
    Install of flarum/flarum failed

The official documentation suggests installing manually. Is this the way composer must be installed for Flarum?

clarkwinkelmann

Is it indeed recommended to install Composer directly from their website. If you already have a global Composer installation, you can also just download composer.phar in your Flarum folder and run commands with php composer.phar [command] instead of composer [command] The biggest benefit of installing from source is that you get the performance benefit of running the latest Composer version, which might not be the case with a system package.

For the specific error in your output, the wording is a bit strange but it looks like it might be a file permission issue. Is your SSH user running Composer able to create new files and folders in the specified path?

notakoder

You nailed it clarkwinkelmann . It was a permission issue. Fixed it. Oh, by the way. The composer installation from debian repo was sufficient.

notakoder

When I change my document root to /forum/public, restart apache and reload the page. I get the site title of the forum followed by the following message:

Something went wrong while trying to load the full version of this site. Try hard-refreshing this page to fix the error.

NB: I am changing the document root after installing the forum, setting up the database and accessing the forum first using the example.com/public url. Tried it in a new browser after emptying cache and cookies. I still get the error. I moment I change back the document root to the forum folder and restarting apache, I get the forum back online.

clarkwinkelmann

notakoder if you change the URL after the installation it should be fine, you just need to update the URL in config.php as well. Also hard-refresh page with CTRL+F5 or clear browser cache before trying again.

If that doesn't fix the error, details might be logged in the browser javascript console or the Flarum log file at <flarum>/storage/logs.

notakoder

clarkwinkelmann you just need to update the URL in config.php as well.

Perhaps this was the reason. Anyway, I reinstalled the forum and changed the document root before setting up the forum. It's working fine now. Here are some of the things I noticed which may be good clarifications to the Flarum Docs.

To install Flarum using composer, the installation directory must be owned by the user.
Once installed, the flarum set up requires you to either change the installation folder recursively into chmod 775 or in my case chown www-data:www-data.

clarkwinkelmann

notakoder thanks for the feedback!

It's always a bit difficult to provide suggestions for folder ownership. The best managed hostings usually already provide compatible users between SSH and webservers. People who install VPSes should be aware of permissions and might already have their own preferences.

Some hostings might even have their own guides with suggestions on how to handle file permission on their servers, in which case it would be better to follow that advice.

Personally I like to run SSH and the webserver as the same user to prevent any problem/confusion, but it's not something that can easily be recommended to people who didn't install the webserver themselves.

notakoder

I understand.