Running XenForo from subfolder but appear as if installed on webroot

[AndyB]

If XenForo is installed for example in the following subfolder:

http://www.example.com/forums/

and I want visitors to be able to use the forum as if I had installed XenForo on the webroot, is this possible? It would be nice if I could add a line of code to the .htaccess file in the webroot to accomplish this.

 

[Marcus]

You can look up the apache documentation for "document root"

I use nginx and I can set any directory as document root. The directive in nginx is "root /var/web/xf2015;", this directory would then serve files for www.example.com

 

[PlayStage]

Hello,

So let me get this straight:
You saying you installed xenforo on domain.com/forums and wish people to access your site as if it were installed on domain.com?

That is not possible.


However you can apply a rewriting rule to redirect all traffic from domain.com to domain.com/forums.
That way when someone types domain.com he will be automatically redirected to domain.com/forums.

Add this to .htaccess:
RewriteRule ^$ /forums [L]


Kind regards,
George.

 

[n00bsaibot]

As mentioned, your service provider should be able to do this by changing root directory to /forums.

This config from stackoverflow could get you started with a .htaccess solution. It worked for me in a small test, but left many broken links (images,CSS,etc). They were defaulting to a subfolder that is being rewritten out.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ /apt/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?mysite.com$
RewriteRule ^apt/(.*) /$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?mysite.com$
RewriteRule !^apt/ apt%{REQUEST_URI} [L]

.htaccess hide subdirectory url after redirect

 

[AndyB]

Thank you, n00bsaibot. I tried doing what you posted and the forum list shows fine but when I click into a forum I get an error.

In the end I just when ahead and moved the /forums/ contents to the web root.

 

[Marcus]

You can use a pointer directory as webroot. If you have these directories:

/var/web/2013
/var/web/2014
/var/web/2015

... you can create a pointer directory

/var/web/live (which is your webroot)

... and point this directory to /var/web/2015

So you can upload a lot of different xenforo installations and just change the pointer directory /var/web/live to the directory you want.

 

[Nicky Vermeersch]

Isn't this why there are route filters in xenforo?

Find route: forums/
Replace with: /

 

[TickTackk]

Maybe just clone the index.php and move it to the root while keeping the other files and folders into the sub directory?

 

[Paul B]

Isn't this why there are route filters in xenforo?

Find route: forums/
Replace with: /

You can't globally remove a route using a route filter.

 

[n00bsaibot]

The stackoverflow directions work... you just need two .htaccess files to do this.

1st at the root to forward all requests to /forums/
2nd (the one posted above) in the /forums/ sub-directory to rewrite the URL

If you forgot the first .htaccess all the files will try to run from the root, where they obviously don't exist.

 

[AndyB]

Thanks n00bsaibot.

It would be extremely helpful if you could post both .htaccess files so people will understand better.

 

[Marcus]

Double redirects for any request will definitely make your forum a bit slower, it depends on how expensive these redirects are. Apache redirects regularly make use of regular expressions (usually when it is difficult to understand the expression, it's a regular one), that makes everything much slower.

 

[AndyB]

As I said earlier, I ended up moving the XenForo software to the web root. I hope XenForo v2.0 will allow the software to be in a sub-folder and also will have a Home page as an option.

 

[Paul B]

It does now.

This very site does exactly that.