Raspberry Pi 5 flarum install (Raspberry Pi OS bookworm - Debian 12)

esbeeb

Hello,
I have a Raspberry Pi 5, and wanted to try a flarum install (currently 1.8.5). I found a recent installation HOWTO (tutorial) here.

Firstly, I want to express appreciation to the author, Navjot Singh.

After reading it through, I felt that it had too many steps. Why couldn't the Debian-packaged versions of php 8.2 (and various modules), php composer, and nginx suffice? Singh goes out of his way to install the very latest versions of all 3 of these, venturing out of the Debian packaging system. This is not to my taste, as I like to trust the Debian packages if at all possible (trusting Debian releasing security updates on those packages).

So I followed Singh's directions, but just simply installed the Debian 12 packages for all those php packages (php is 8.2.20), nginx (ver 1.22) and composer (ver 2.5.5).

Every time Singh was intent to use a username and group of "nginx", I just went with Debian's defaults of "www-data".

For example, to actually install flarum, here's what I did differently than Singh's directions:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/flarum
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/flarum
sudo su -
cd /var/www/flarum
sudo -u www-data composer create-project flarum/flarum .
exit
sudo chmod 775 -R /var/www/flarum

This simplifying I did, seems to have all worked just fine.

esbeeb

Once I understood how to run php composer directly as the "www-data" user (as above), then it was no hardship to install Flarum modules as well. For example, I installed the "upload" and "emoji picker" modules:

sudo su -
cd /var/www/flarum
sudo -u www-data composer require fof/upload:"*"
sudo -u www-data composer require clarkwinkelmann/flarum-ext-emojionearea
exit

Note: The web pages for those two modules give you the "composer" command to run, but make no mention of that highly-relevant-on-Debian "sudo -u www-data" which should be prepended on the front (and that should be run as root). It would be very un-intuitive for any Debian newcomer to know to do that pre-pending.

Also note: Singh's HOWTO has a further opportunity to simplify/economize some of the steps, by running composer directly as the www-data user. Singh runs composer as a regular (non-root) user - which is not www-data - then modifies ownerships.

clarkwinkelmann

esbeeb you can use sudo su to switch to the www-data user and then run all the commands verbatim.

It wouldn't be reasonable to provide every one-liner for every possible shell user name in the README files.

Personally on my VPSes I configure the webserver to run as the main shell user, like ubuntu. Then the website and all Composer configuration can reside in the /home directory of the user and it's impossible to accidentally run a Composer or Flarum command as the wrong user.