This is an open-sourced forum built with Laravel. It's very much a work in progress. It's about as basic as it gets and is largely unstyled aside from basic Bootstrap formatting.
To run this project, you must have PHP 7 installed as a prerequisite.
Begin by cloning this repository to your machine, and installing all Composer & NPM dependencies.
git clone git@github.com:bpat86/forum.git
cd forum && composer install && npm install
mv .env.example .env
php artisan key:generateNext, create a new database and reference its name and username/password within the project's .env file. In the example below, we've named the database, "forum."
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=forum
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=
Then, migrate your database to create tables.
php artisan migrate
Then, if you wish to, run the database seeders to populate the forum with sample data.
php artisan db:seed
reCAPTCHA is a Google tool to help prevent forum spam. You'll need to create a free account (don't worry, it's quick).
https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/
Choose reCAPTCHA V2, and specify your local (and eventually production) domain name.
Once submitted, you'll see two important keys that should be referenced in your .env file.
RECAPTCHA_KEY=PASTE_KEY_HERE
RECAPTCHA_SECRET=PASTE_SECRET_HERE
Until an administration portal is available, manually insert any number of "channels" (think of these as forum categories) into the "channels" table in your database.
Once finished, clear your server cache, and you're all set to go!
php artisan cache:clear
Use your forum! Visit http://forum.test/threads to create a new account and publish your first thread.