Flarum Documentation

Installation

Flarum is beta software. That means it still has some incomplete features and bugs 🐛🐞, and at some point – sooner or later – it will probably break! 💥

Beta is all about fixing these issues and improving Flarum. Please don't use Flarum in production unless you know what you're doing. We can’t support you if things go awry. Upgrading to subsequent versions will be possible, but might involve getting your hands dirty.

Quick test drive?

Feel free to give Flarum a spin on one of our demonstration forums. Or set up your own forum in seconds at Free Flarum, a free third party service not affiliated with the Flarum team.

Server Requirements

Before you install Flarum, it's important to check that your server meets the requirements. To run Flarum, you will need:

  • Apache (with mod_rewrite enabled) or Nginx
  • PHP 7.1+ with the following extensions: curl, dom, gd, json, mbstring, openssl, pdo_mysql, tokenizer, zip
  • MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10.0.5+
  • SSH (command-line) access to run Composer

Shared Hosting

At this stage, it's not possible to install Flarum by downloading a ZIP file and uploading the files to your web server. This is because Flarum uses a dependency-management system called Composer which needs to run on the command line.

This doesn't necessarily mean you need a VPS. Some shared hosts give you SSH access, through which you should be able to install Composer and Flarum just fine. For other hosts without SSH, you can try workarounds such as Pockethold.

Installing

Flarum uses Composer to manage its dependencies and extensions. Before installing Flarum, you will need to install Composer on your machine. Afterwards, run this command in an empty location that you want Flarum to be installed in:

composer create-project flarum/flarum . --stability=beta

While this command is running, you can configure your web server. You will need to make sure your webroot is set to /path/to/your/forum/public, and set up URL Rewriting as per the instructions below.

When everything is ready, navigate to your forum in a web browser and follow the instructions to complete the installation.

URL Rewriting

Apache

Flarum includes a .htaccess file in the public directory – make sure it has been uploaded correctly. If you're using shared hosting, confirm with your provider that mod_rewrite is enabled and .htaccess files are allowed. If you're managing your own server, you may need to add the following to your site configuration:

<Directory "/path/to/flarum/public">
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Nginx

Flarum includes a .nginx.conf file – make sure it has been uploaded correctly. Then, assuming you have a PHP site set up within Nginx, add the following to your server's configuration block:

include /path/to/flarum/.nginx.conf;

Caddy

Caddy requires a very simple configuration in order for Flarum to work properly. Note that you should replace the URL with your own and the path with the path to your own public folder. If you are using a different version of PHP, you wil also need to change the fastcgi path to point to your correct PHP install socket or URL.

www.example.com {
    root /var/www/flarum/public
    rewrite {
        to {path} {path}/ /index.php
    }
    fastcgi / /var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock php
    header /assets {
        +Cache-Control "public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate"
        +Cache-Control "max-age=25000"
        Pragma "public" 
    }
    gzip
}

Folder Ownership

During installation, Flarum may request that you set some folders to permission level 755. If after completing these steps, Flarum continues to request that you change the permissions you may need to check that your files are owned by the correct group and user.

By default in most linux distributions, www-data is the group and user that both PHP and the web server operate under. You can change the folder ownership in most linux operating systems by running chown -R www-data:www-data foldername/.

Environments may vary

Your environment may vary from the documentation provided, please consult your web server configuration or web hosting provider for the proper user and group that PHP and the web server operate under.

Never use permission 777

You should never set any folder or file to permission level 777, as this permission level allows anyone to access the content of the folder and file regardless of user or group.

Customizing Paths

By default Flarum's directory structure includes a public directory which contains only publicly-accessible files. This is a security best-practice, ensuring that all sensitive source code files are completely inaccessible from the web root.

However, if you wish to host Flarum in a subdirectory (like yoursite.com/forum), or if your host doesn't give you control over your webroot (you're stuck with something like public_html or htdocs), you can set up Flarum without the public directory.

Simply move all the files inside the public directory (including .htaccess) into the directory you want to serve Flarum from. Then edit .htaccess and uncomment lines 9-14 in order to protect sensitive resources. Finally, edit both index.php and the flarum executable, and update the paths in the following lines to reflect your new directory structure:

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

'base' => __DIR__,
'public' => __DIR__,
'storage' => __DIR__.'/storage',

Importing Data

If you have an existing community and don't want to start from scratch, you may be able to import your existing data into Flarum. While there are no official importers yet, the community has made several unofficial importers:

These can be used for other forum software as well by migrating to phpBB first, then to Flarum. Be aware that we can't guarantee that these will work nor can we offer support for them.

← Updating →