Set up a VPS and getting a domain for the VPS will not be covered in this blog. Here, I am assuming we have already got our VPS up running. I am using the 1Panel control panel to install the Flarum forum web service, which is one of the most popular forum these days on the market, together MyBB, Discourse, etc. The installation instruction for 1Panel can be found in Ref. [1]. Once 1Panel is installed successfully, we can go to its web interface, log in and install applications such as Flarum and quite a few other apps from its app store. In the backend, it is running docker for the installation so later on, we can go to the command line, connect to our VPS and manage the running docker container for the Flarum service from the command line.
By default, when installing Flarum from 1Panel, a few extensions may have already been installed. However, to make our forum more rich in functionalities, we could go to Ref. [2] to obtain the plugins to install on our Flarum. For the installation, we can go into our running Flarum docker container and execute the command as suggested on the extension web page. To go into the running docker container, we do can something like this,
sudo docker ps -a
sudo docker exec -it c48274cdba79 /bin/bash
where the first line of the command is to obtain the ID of the running docker container and the second line runs the docker container in the interactive mode with the ID obtained in the first step. Then we can execute the installation command for the extension within the docker container,
composer require sycho/flarum-private-facade:"*"
Sometimes, the installation may fail due to version incompatibility and it seems we don’t have a good solution in such a situation. Also, it can happen that after the installation and activation of a certain extension, the whole server may break down, due to some PhP error. In such a situation, if the docker container interactive shell is still alive, we can try to remove the just installed extension by running something like,
composer remove sycho/flarum-private-facade:"*"
In case of bad luck where there is no way to revert, we may have to rebuild the app within the 1Panel interface, in which case we will lose all the installed extensions – other configurations for the forum seems to persist.
References
[1] https://github.com/1Panel-dev/1Panel/blob/dev/docs/README_EN.md