How do I install other applications alongside Laravel? - php

Question

I'm building a website in Laravel 5.2 and rather than building a forum from scratch, I wish to install one such as SMF.
Laravel is currently in the root directory of my web server and I wish to keep it there as I wish to install SMF in a folder.
For example: www.example.com/smf
I'm thinking to install it in Laravel's /public folder but I'm afraid they will they conflict with each other. Is the /publicfolder the correct place to install SMF and should I use a route to point to the SMF folder?
Server: D.O droplet via Laravel Forge

Answer 1

You need to add custom rules for the folder(s) you want to use before Laravel related rules:
location /smf/index.php(/.*)?$ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(/smf/index.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_read_timeout 1000;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
include fastcgi_params;
}
location /smf/ {
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^.*$ /smf/index.php last;
}
try_files $uri $uri/ smf/index.php?args;
}
Please look for sample nginx config file here.

Answer 2

You could use Nginx to redirect www.example.com/smf to your SMF installation. To do so add this to your server block:
location /smf {
# nginx will concatenate the string above with the root value
# so your SMF files should be in "/path/to/smf/parent/dir/smf".
# Make sure that Nginx can access them.
root "/path/to/smf/parent/dir";
# change this config to suit your needs
index index.php index.html index.htm;
location ~ \.php$ {
# Here use the same config from the server block that allows you
# to execute PHP scripts
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9123;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}
A couple of things I should add:
Backup the config file before editing them.
Although I've tried the code above (and it works on my machine™) I must say that I'm not an Nginx expert.