New install help "The page you requested could not be found"

Griz

Hello, I am hoping someone can help as I haven't been able to get anywhere with Flarum and it's been rather a frustrating experience!

I am using the no public directory version of Flarum "flarum-v1.x-no-public-dir-php8.3" on Apache 2.4.59 with PHP 8.3.8 installed on my Windows test machine. After unzipping the flarum archive into my project I can use the web browser to navigate to the index.php file and it starts the wizard to name the forum and connect to the database. After I fill this in the page lands on "The page you requested could not be found. Return to <my site title>". I can see that the database has populated, so the configuration seems to have worked but nothing I do seems to make the forum work. I have checked the config file, tried it http and https versions, different browsers.

In trying to debug the issue, I have found that the index page gives a debug of RouteNotFoundException, if I access /admin, the page displays "You do not have permission to access this page" ( PermissionDeniedException) and /login says "An error occurred while trying to load this page." (RouteNotFoundException). As far as I can see the htaccess file is being read because if I change parts of it such as Options -Indexes to + then I have directory listing...I feel like I've been over the installation docs again and again, I've tried composer, I've tried the public folder version, I've tried an entirely different machine with a fresh install of both Apache and PHP...Somehow it's falling into the same hole each time. I hate writing help posts, but it feels like it must be something trivial and I'm hoping someone has the answer. Thanks for reading.

Flarum core: 1.8.5
PHP version: 8.3.8
MySQL version: 10.11.8-MariaDB
Loaded extensions: Core, bcmath, calendar, ctype, date, filter, hash, iconv, json, SPL, pcre, random, readline, Reflection, session, standard, mysqlnd, tokenizer, zlib, libxml, dom, PDO, openssl, SimpleXML, xml, xmlreader, xmlwriter, curl, fileinfo, gd, mbstring, mysqli, Phar, pdo_mysql, pdo_pgsql, zip
+----------------------+---------+--------+
| Flarum Extensions | | |
+----------------------+---------+--------+
| ID | Version | Commit |
+----------------------+---------+--------+
| flarum-flags | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-approval | v1.8.1 | |
| flarum-tags | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-suspend | v1.8.1 | |
| flarum-subscriptions | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-sticky | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-statistics | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-mentions | v1.8.3 | |
| flarum-markdown | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-lock | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-likes | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-lang-english | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-emoji | v1.8.0 | |
| flarum-bbcode | v1.8.0 | |
+----------------------+---------+--------+
Base URL: https://localhost/pcs/forum
Installation path: C:\apache24\htdocs\pcs\forum
Queue driver: sync
Session driver: file
Mail driver: mail
Debug mode: off

Griz

Just in case it proves relevent this is some more information about my installation:

config.php

<?php return array ( 'debug' => false, 'database' => array ( 'driver' => 'mysql', 'host' => 'localhost', 'port' => 3306, 'database' => 'flarum', 'username' => <my username>, 'password' => <my password>, 'charset' => 'utf8mb4', 'collation' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci', 'prefix' => 'flarum_', 'strict' => false, 'engine' => 'InnoDB', 'prefix_indexes' => true, ), 'url' => 'https://localhost/pcs/forum', 'paths' => array ( 'api' => 'api', 'admin' => 'admin', ), 'headers' => array ( 'poweredByHeader' => true, 'referrerPolicy' => 'same-origin', ), );

site.php

`<?php

This file is part of Flarum.
*
For detailed copyright and license information, please view the
LICENSE file that was distributed with this source code.
*/

/*
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Load the autoloader
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| First, let's include the autoloader, which is generated automatically by
| Composer (PHP's package manager) after installing our dependencies.
| From now on, all classes in our dependencies will be usable without
| explicitly loading any files.
|
*/

require DIR.'/vendor/autoload.php';

/*
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Configure the site
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| A Flarum site represents your local installation of Flarum. It can be
| configured with a bunch of paths:
|
| - The base path is Flarum's root directory and contains important files
| such as config.php and extend.php.
| - The public path is the directory that serves as document root for the
| web server. Files in this place are accessible to the public internet.
| This is where assets such as JavaScript files or CSS stylesheets need to
| be stored in a default install.
| - The storage path is a place for Flarum to store files it generates during
| runtime. This could be caches, session data or other temporary files.
|
| The fully configured site instance is returned to the including script, which
| then uses it to boot up the Flarum application and e.g. accept web requests.
|
*/

return Flarum\Foundation\Site::fromPaths([
'base' => DIR,
'public' => DIR,
'storage' => DIR.'/storage',
]);
`

index.php

`<?php

This file is part of Flarum.
*
For detailed copyright and license information, please view the
LICENSE file that was distributed with this source code.
*/

$site = require './site.php';

/*
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Accept incoming HTTP requests
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Every HTTP request pointed to the web server that cannot be served by simply
| responding with one of the files in the "public" directory will be sent to
| this file. Now is the time to boot up Flarum's internal HTTP server, which
| will try its best to interpret the request and return the appropriate
| response, which could be a JSON document (for API responses) or a lot of HTML.
|
*/

$server = new Flarum\Http\Server($site);
$server->listen();`

site.php and index.php are in the same "forum" folder. The .htaccess is present and the one that comes with the "no public folder" archive, so it has lines 9-15 uncommented.

luceos

Griz /login isn't officially a route of Flarum, it uses a popup modal for that.

I'd love to hear what your URL is so I can check the response headers of one of those 404 pages, make sure to test out the following routes:

/api
/api/discussions

If you're able to share the response headers yourself from one of the 404 pages please do share. Otherwise reach out to me on Discord or email.