How to run the server, or where is the rest of the documentation?

niblettc

Experienced software developer here. Evaluating using Flarum for a project. Little to no php experience. Extensive experience with Node, Angular, MongoDB, MySQL, python, etc.

Working through this guide: https://docs.flarum.org/contributing/#development-setup
down to this section about running my own local server.

I don't have a clear enough mental model to understand what the guide is telling me. In my experience deploying NodeJS servers, you run node at some localhost, and then expose it to incoming HTTP traffic using Nginx for a production / dev build on a server. For local development purposes it just runs at whatever localhost you define.

I have 0 experience running any PHP software. I know I'm missing something that's just assumed I should know, but I don't.
After I run npm install and npm run dev, how do I access my instance locally? Is this documented somewhere?

clarkwinkelmann

niblettc welcome to Flarum!

The next paragraph in the documentation offers a few suggestions on how to run a webserver locally https://docs.flarum.org/contributing/#development-tools , like Laravel Valet, XAMPP or Docker.

Basically you need the same software as you would find on a production server, including a webserver like Apache or nginx, which will handle PHP files for you. A tool like XAMPP is a bundle of Apache/MySQL/PHP that you can easily install on Windows.

Personally I'm using Linux on my PC so I have directly installed Apache on the system itself, and configure new VirtualHosts for each of my apps.

You can even use the PHP development server to make the workflow more similar to a NodeJS app, but it requires to write a server.php file and I don't think anyone has a version ready for Flarum 1.x . There are older projects (Artuu serve and Flagrow serve) that might be a good starting point if you want to use that option. I think the latest server.php file from Laravel should work out of the box because we have gotten rid of anything non-standard https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/8.x/server.php

It should be very similar to working on Wordpress plugins for example. You need to run Wordpress locally just like if it was on a server. Same with Flarum.