Absolute URLs vs Relative URLs

hindsight

Hello - first post here, I've been looking at starting a flarum forum, based on imported content from a previous community (and after playing with phpbb, I've come to the conclusion that flarum is a much better option).

I have a development environment set up, and one thing that I'm noticing is that flarum makes use of absolute URLs, which will make it difficult to take a cut of the (pre-)production database and present it as a dev environment, or to present the same forum through multiple domainnames.

Example from my dev environment on my local network, where the protocol, host and port is hardcoded into the page.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cerebro.local:810/assets/forum.css?v=6e677644"> <link rel="next" href="http://cerebro.local:810?page=2"> <link rel="canonical" href="http://cerebro.local:810">

Interested to get views on this - is this something that has been discussed before (I couldn't find by searching), or is there a solution already in place?

Thanks,
Mike

luceos

hindsight hello and welcome to the community.

Originally Flarum was meant to only serve itself from one url, configured in the config.php. This is still the case, though a work around exists by allowing it to serve more than one domain or host; you would still need to set up a fallback though.

As for your issues between your environments, I don't see what the problem is honestly. You mention you want to take (part of) the production database for local development, I do that all the time. Assets and their URL's are never stored in the database, they are actually generated on the fly. The only thing that might be stored in the database related to URL's is if users post links to other discussions/posts in their post, but as this happens in production and you don't want to push your local testing posts to production, I don't see why this is going to be an issue. Once you change the domain of your community, you can run a SQL query to update the URL's in the posts table in one swoop.

Am I missing something?

hindsight

luceos their URL's are never stored in the database, they are actually generated on the fly.

I suspect you probably aren't missing anything - now that you've helped me think through some of the detail, I probably just need to consider my configuration and process a bit more. Thanks for your time!