Questions about Flarum

Wlork

Hello,

I signed up to learn more about Flarum 🙂

I'd like to create a forum. Preferably a new generation forum which is light, fast, where new posts appear in real time, where notifications are complet and etc. I found 3 applications : Flarum, Discorse and NodeBB.

On paper, Flarum seems the best, for me. I've heard a lot of positive reviews and it's free. On the other hand, I'm worried about the installation.... For server, I understood that it must be SSH compatible. But for Composer, I don't understand much, how to install it, where to install it ?

There is a tutorial on your site but I would need pictures, videos, something that explains the procedure step by step.

I'm French, sorry if my English seems a bit perfectible 🙂

Thanks in advance for your response

luceos

Wlork There is a tutorial on your site but I would need pictures, videos, something that explains the procedure step by step.

There are some resources on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=flarum
Maybe these can help.

Fire away with any questions you might have.

llaumgui

Wlork I found 3 applications : Flarum, Discorse and NodeBB.

3 languages different:

Flarum: PHP
Discourse: Ruby
NodeBB: NodeJS

Wlork

Thank you!

If I understood correctly, I have to install Composer in the server, where will the forum be? 🙂

luceos

Wlork once you've installed composer you can use composer to install it inside your webserver public directory. I highly recommend getting a shared hosting provider, or use a managed solution like https://blomstra.net.

llaumgui

Other difference: NodeBB and Discourse provide OSS solution, but they put forward Cloud solutions (with pricing).

Flarum put forward OSS self-hosted solution and recommend some cloud provider.

luceos why Blomstra is so separated to Flarum ? why do not have a official service managed solution on cloud ?

luceos

llaumgui why Blomstra is so separated to Flarum ? why do not have a official service managed solution on cloud ?

I wondered that myself not too long ago.

Let's not go offtopic for the sake of helping out @Wlork as best as we can 👍️

Wlork

I'm testing with FreeFlarium and I'm impressed with Flarium.

Very light, very fast and above all very user-friendly. It's so easy to use on PC or mobile, unlike a classic PHPBB forum. Really congrulations ! I'll probably adopt it in the next weeks, months (I still need time to understand all the possible options) 🙂

Wlork

If we install Flarum ourselves on our server, it will be the same version as the minimal installation of FreeFlarium?

clarkwinkelmann

Wlork Flarum ships with only about 10 built-in extensions. But all the extensions you see on FreeFlarum can be manually installed on a self-hosted forum as well.

SKevo

Wlork FYI you can check FreeFlarum's composer.json here. You can copy the require section to your composer.json and then use composer install to install all FreeFlarum extensions on your forum

Also, you might want to check out Caddy, the configuration is simpler than Apache and Nginx IMO, and it handles SSL certificates automatically. I personally think that it might suit you better as a beginner?

Wlork

Thank !

I will probably install Flarum next month. To summarize:

Have a server with SSH access
Apache (with mod_rewrite enabled), PHP 7.3+ and MySQL 5.6+/8.0.23
Install Composer on the server
Install Flarum with command
composer create-project flarum/flarum
Follow the installation instructions

Is that all? I have nothing else to do ? 🙂 (if everything goes well of course)

luceos

Wlork Apache (with mod_rewrite enabled)

Nginx is also recommended. But all webservers that support php and rewriting will work. It easier for you to steer close to the recommendations (Apache and nginx) though.

Wlork Is that all? I have nothing else to do ?

Pretty much. Installing extensions can be done with composer on ssh too.

llaumgui

Wlork Apache (with mod_rewrite enabled), PHP 7.3+ and MySQL 5.6+/8.0.23

PHP 7 is EOL... Use PHP 8 instead. Also use MariaDB 10 instead of a old MySQL 5.6.

Wlork

luceos Nginx is also recommended. But all webservers that support php and rewriting will work. It easier for you to steer close to the recommendations (Apache and nginx) though.

llaumgui PHP 7 is EOL... Use PHP 8 instead. Also use MariaDB 10 instead of a old MySQL 5.6.

The server is compatible with PHP8+, MariaDB and NGinx. So it's very good, thank you for advices 🙂

SKevo FYI you can check FreeFlarum's composer.json here. You can copy the require section to your composer.json and then use composer install to install all FreeFlarum extensions on your forum

Thanks. I admit it's very convenient but I prefer to install the extensions one by one.

Wlork

I ordered my server so if everything is fine, I will install Flarum next week 🙂 !

I anticipate a little, I would like to know if there is a way to block the access to forum so that I can work quietly ?

luceos

Wlork I anticipate a little, I would like to know if there is a way to block the access to forum so that I can work quietly ?

You can disable registration and disallow seeing any discussions from the permissions page of your admin area.

Wlork

I finish preparations for installation 🙂

PHP was at 8.0 by default. I upgraded to 8.1 with the default modules/extensions.

And, I have MariaDB 10.6.12

I hope it's ok ? 🙂

luceos

Wlork you should be fine.

Wlork

Thank you 🙂

Thanks to FreeFlarum, I made a first list of extensions already installed or to install :

Approval
BBCode
Disussion views
Emoji
Flags
Flamoji
FoF Byōbu
FoF Draft
FoF Formatting
FoF Ignore Users
FoF Links
FoF Night Mode
FoF Pages
FoF Terms
Forum Widgets
Likes
Like Preview
Lock
Markdown
Mentions
Moderator Warnings
Move Posts
News Widget
Pusher
Sign Up Confirm Password
Statistics
Sticky
Subscriptions
Suspend
Tags
French

Are there any extensions that I absolutely must install ? Especially for security (spam and others) and SEO ? 🙂