Detailed Installation Tutorial for PHP Lightweight Community Flarum Beta 11

Flarum released version 0.1.0-beta.11 a few weeks ago. See Flarum 0.1.0-beta.11 Released for details. So let’s take a look at how to install this version from scratch. The previous article already covered installing Composer and switching to a domestic mirror, so the following steps are very easy.

Preparation

My test environment is as follows:

Apache 2.4PHP 7.3MySQL 5.6

The server requirements in the official documentation are:

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

The official documentation does not seem to mention one important extension: fileinfo. This extension is required by Flarum and can be installed directly through the BaoTa panel, which is very simple.

If the available memory is less than or equal to 1 GB, the installation may fail. In that case, you need to add swap memory to ensure that the installation succeeds. I will not go into detail about how to add it; the Linux Toolbox in BaoTa has the relevant option.

Create a new site. It is recommended to choose utf8mb4 for the database encoding, although utf8 works as well.

First, let me mention something that was not covered in the previous article. I encountered many warnings while using Composer, such as the following:

According to the warnings, the relevant functions were probably disabled by BaoTa’s default PHP configuration. I summarized them, and the functions that need to be removed are as follows:

putenvpcntl_signalproc_open

Start Installation

First, cd to the website root directory and run rm -rf * to delete all files.

Well, I tried it, and rm -rf did not delete everything. It is better to delete them using the file manager in the BaoTa panel. .htaccess and .user.ini must also be deleted to ensure that the directory contains no files. Then install directly using Composer:

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

The installation will be complete after a while. Do not rush to access the site yet; first install a Simplified Chinese plugin:

# 繁体中文composer require csineneo/lang-traditional-chinese# 简体中文composer require csineneo/lang-simplified-chinese

Then change the permissions of all directories and files under the website directory to 755, and point the website root directory to /public.

You can now access the website!