Vanilla Forums is a free and open-source community forum software that allows you to create online discussion forums. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of installing Vanilla Forums on Arch Linux.
Before we install Vanilla Forums, we need to ensure that our system meets the following prerequisites:
Vanilla Forums requires some packages to be installed on the system. To install them, run the following command:
sudo pacman -S composer git npm
Once they're installed, we can proceed to the next step.
Next, we need to create a new database for Vanilla Forums. You can use the following command to create a database:
sudo mysql -u root -p
Enter your MySQL root password and create a new database using the following command:
CREATE DATABASE vanilla_db;
Replace vanilla_db with the name of your database. Next, create a new user and grant them all privileges on the database:
CREATE USER 'vanilla_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON vanilla_db.* TO 'vanilla_user'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Replace vanilla_user with the name of your user and set a strong password. Next, exit the MySQL prompt.
The next step is to download the latest version of Vanilla Forums from the official website. You can use the following command to download and extract the latest release:
sudo git clone --branch release/2021.009 https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla.git /var/www/html/vanilla
This will create a new directory named vanilla in /var/www/html/ with the files of Vanilla Forums.
Now change into the Vanilla Forums directory:
cd /var/www/html/vanilla
You need to install the dependencies of Vanilla Forums using the following command:
sudo composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
Now you need to configure Vanilla Forums. Rename conf/config-defaults.php to conf/config.php:
cd conf
sudo mv config-defaults.php config.php
Next, edit the config.php file:
sudo nano config.php
Find the following section:
<?php
// ...
// Database configuration
// ...
And edit it with the following settings:
<?php
// ...
// Database configuration
$Configuration['Database']['Host'] = 'localhost';
$Configuration['Database']['Name'] = 'vanilla_db';
$Configuration['Database']['User'] = 'vanilla_user';
$Configuration['Database']['Password'] = 'password';
// ...
Replace password with the password you created earlier for the user vanilla_user. Save and exit the file.
You need to set the correct file permissions for Vanilla Forums to function correctly. Change into the Vanilla Forums directory:
cd /var/www/html/vanilla
Next, run the following command to set the correct file permissions:
sudo chown -R http:http /var/www/html/vanilla
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/vanilla
sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/vanilla/cache
Vanilla Forums requires some PHP extensions to work correctly. Install and enable them with the following commands:
sudo pacman -S php-gd php-intl php-mbstring php-xml php-zip
sudo systemctl restart httpd.service
Replace httpd.service with the name of your web server. If you're using Nginx, replace httpd.service with nginx.service.
Now that we've completed the installation, we can access Vanilla Forums by navigating to http://your_domain.com/vanilla in a web browser.
In this tutorial, we've walked you through the process of installing Vanilla Forums on Arch Linux. As a next step, you can customize your forum's appearance and features through the administration dashboard. Happy discussions!
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