How to I set-up an identical instance of my live production Flarum site

Wellwisher

Hi All,

I want to set-up an identical instance (a test-bench if you will) of my live production Flarum so that I can test/ install third-party extensions and make sure that they work etc. I have my flarum running inside a sub-folder.

On SMF forum system, this process was simple. You would just copy over the database and system folders and connect the database - job done.

On Flarum is it the same process?

The bit that confuses me is that if I copy over the database and the flarum system folders, the system folders contain the Composer installation files... won't copying over everything exactly break things?

Do I need to run additional composer codes? I got no sauce. 😕

clarkwinkelmann

Wellwisher if you copy-paste every file, it will work fine just like other software.

I suggest changing the email driver to "null" or "log" to make sure you don't accidentally send emails to your real users from the test website.

The benefit with Composer is that you can save some time by not copying the vendor folder. Copy everything except that folder, then run composer install on the second server and it will re-create the folder with the same files. Basically everything to create in vendor is described by the combination of composer.json and composer.lock, so there's no need to copy or backup that folder under most circumstances.

If you copy-paste everything and don't run Composer, make sure both servers use the same PHP version and PHP extensions.

Wellwisher

I understood most of your reply. Thank you.

clarkwinkelmann If you copy-paste everything and don't run Composer

Can you please clarify the above quote for me? Do you mean if I copy-paste everything, I can't install third-party extensions using composer? because I want to be able to install other extensions to test them first.

Do you mean if I copy-paste everything, don't run the code: composer install because there won't be a need as I have copied over every file manually.

Apologies in advance, I am a simple-minded fellow. 😂

Mand

Hi, I'd like to create a staging environment as the exact copy (mirror) of my live Flarum forum, right now I just want to enable/disable extensions one by one to check if there's one extension conflicting with another and breaking the site, so searching here I found:

clarkwinkelmann Wellwisher if you copy-paste every file, it will work fine just like other software.

Is this still the recommended way or is there a new way that would always keep staging and production in sync therefore eliminating the need to copy-paste every file every time a new extension has been added i.e. in a couple of days as I further develop the forum and add a new extension?

thanks,

clarkwinkelmann

Wellwisher in both situations you will be able to install or remove new extensions.

Running composer install never hurts. If it was not necessary, it won't have any effect.

If you copy everything, you can use Flarum immediately, no need to run composer install after the copy.

If you copy everything except vendor, you must run composer install, otherwise you will not be able to access the forum.

Wellwisher

Hey Clark thank you for help on this, and for clarifying this for me. Seems straight forward enough, I will try this. 🙂

Wellwisher

One more question on the same topic. Can you easily run multiple instances of flarum in subfolders or will it run into conflict issues?

clarkwinkelmann

Wellwisher you might need to customize the cookie prefix or path with config.php if you want to be able to open sessions on multiple of the subfolders at the same time, but otherwise there shouldn't be any issue.