My install experience

SportDevAdam

Hi, all, I'm new to Flarum and having solved a few issues during installation I wanted to share in case the same scenario might help others.

First off, I'm using shared hosting (in the UK with UK2). Issue number 1 was in trying to install Composer. I had UK2 Support enable shell access so I could SSH in, but when running the Composer installer, I received an error that the php configuration had allow_url_fopen=Off and that option was required for dependencies to work properly. I checked my php.ini file and indeed it contains allow_url_fopen=On. Confused. It turns out that command line php (required to install Composer) uses a different php.ini file and as a shared hosting customer I do not get access to it. So, to get around this problem, I had to use the -d option to override php.ini settings:

#php -d allow_url_fopen=On composer-setup.php

This allowed the installer to run with allow_url_fopen set to to on.

Next problem, I discovered that Flarum has to be installed into an empty folder. So, it's impossible to use a local installation of Composer in the same folder as the folder into which Flarum in being installed. OK, so I installed Composer into its own folder, and then created a shiny new empty folder for Flarum. Of course I had to use the same syntax in the install, so for me the line that worked was:

php -d allow_url_fopen=On ../composer/composer.phar create-project flarum/flarum . --stability=beta

During install, I see a large number of errors reporting that "The Process class relies on proc_open, which is not available on your PHP installation." This is because proc_open is disabled on the command line php, but it is enabled within my php.ini which applied to my shared hosting, so this will in fact not be a problem.

I also see many occurrences of "Unzip with unzip command failed, falling back to ZipArchive class" which I guess must be a characteristic of my shared hosting. Doesn't seem to cause a problem.

OK, so having run the installer, I think I am on the home straight. I browse to http://mydomain.com/forum and see a 500 error. Looking at the apache error log, it reports "index.php is writeable by group" which is evidently forbidden by my shared hosting setup. So I CHMod index.php to 644, and reload the page.

Now I get the "Install Flarum" page, and I am able to set up my Flarum.

All Ok now until I try to go to "Administration" at which point I get another 500 error. This time the error log reports that "admin.php is writeable by group" so I CHmod that to 644 (from 664 as it had been after install).

Refresh the page, success. Everything running perfectly.

As you can imagine it took a while to get past all those issues, so I wanted to to report here so that (a) it might help someone in the same situation and (b) in case those working on the install script might want to know.

luceos

SportDevAdam i absolutely love that you took the time to report all this! I'm not sure we can cover all environments during our beta, but we'll do our best to make the installation procedure as easy as possible!

jordanjay29

Installing Flarum on a shared host is tricky, as each shared host has its own features and restrictions of what they will allow. The best experience usually comes on a VPS, though a little more work may be needed to maintain one. Glad to see you got Flarum installed, though.

paktua

hi, also find same error like yours,but when i try this command

php -d allow_url_fopen=On composer-setup.php

i found an error says Could not open input file: composer-setup.php

please help,

Ralkage

paktua That is because the file you are trying to open/execute doesn't exist silly ?

https://getcomposer.org/download/

You need to first download it, then run the command and it will look at your PHP config settings and then grab the latest composer.phar ?

Of course, if you're using a VPS you can install Composer globally as well. Shared is another story and requires PHP config alteration and SSH access regardless.