Why self-host your community forum with Flarum?
SaaS forum platforms (Discourse Cloud, Vanilla, Tribe) charge per seat, impose their terms on your community data, and put their infrastructure between you and your users. Flarum removes that dependency.
Licensed under MIT, Flarum is free to deploy and modify. Its PHP + MariaDB stack is lightweight: a 1 GB RAM VPS handles an active community. And unlike phpBB or Vanilla, the interface is an Ember.js SPA — new posts, likes and notifications appear without a page reload, bringing the experience closer to a modern chat while keeping the persistence of a forum.
What Flarum brings to your ServOrbit VPS
- Real-time SPA interface — new posts and notifications without page reloads, ergonomics close to Slack.
- Rich extension system — discussion-likes, markdown-editor, polls, badges, OAuth SSO, custom pages, and hundreds of other Composer packages.
- Native full-text search — MariaDB FULLTEXT index on discussion titles and post content.
- Granular permissions — public, semi-private (approved registration) or fully private, configurable per group and per tag.
- JSON:API — read and write discussions from external tools (n8n, webhooks, mobile apps).
- Simple updates —
docker compose pull && docker compose up -dupdates the image without touching your data.
Deployment steps on ServOrbit
Attach a domain before deploying
Flarum writes FLARUM_BASE_URL into its config on first startup. Changing that value afterwards requires recreating the volumes. From your ServOrbit client area, attach your domain before clicking Deploy.
Deploy from the Marketplace
Marketplace → Collaboration → Flarum → Deploy. ServOrbit provisions an Ubuntu 24.04 VPS, installs Docker, and starts two containers: MariaDB 10.11 (with a healthcheck before Flarum starts) and crazymax/flarum. The full installation takes 60 to 90 seconds.
Change the default password
Flarum creates an admin account with credentials flarum / flarum. Go to
https://yourdomain.com/admin, log in and immediately change the password from Administration → Profile. Do not skip this step.Configure the forum and extensions
In the admin panel, set the forum title, description and cover image URL. Enable the extensions you want — polls, markdown-editor, SSO — from the Extensions tab. Installing an extension is one click from the UI or
composer requireinside the container.
Security and backups
Flarum stores all its data in the /data Docker volume (assets, extensions, storage) and in MariaDB. To back up, copy the /data volume and export the database: docker exec <db_container> mysqldump -uflarum -p$DB_PASSWORD flarum > backup.sql. Restore by remounting the volumes and reimporting the dump.
On first login, change the flarum account password and restrict /admin access to your IP via the ServOrbit firewall if your forum is public.
