Folder structure that will be used to support Composer natively

Background

We want to move to supporting Composer-base install and upgrades natively in Mautic. To do that we have identified several challenges:

• Composer would wipe out everything each time, so we need to change the structure to prevent that happening otherwise custom plugins and themes would be lost,

• Local.php will need to be moved to the database as some file systems are not writeable, and many using Composer will expect this - at present there are all kinds of hacky things going on to work around it like creating an empty file,

• Plugin and theme discovery is difficult - it should be possible to look for the folders rather than pre-specify the locations so that they can be moved to suit the environment,

• We are essentially moving from being a Symfony project to being a library - this needs to be taken into consideration

We need to brainstorm the folder structure that we need, and come to an agreement of what it would be:

• Would have to be released in 4.0, we expect, but we can work on it now and get those decisions made

• We need to think about shared hosting and make it configurable so Mautic can still work without the folders being a level above - this should be the default with an option during the install process to move it

Questions / discussion points

• Multiple Mautic instances - would that be a problem?

Suggested Composer package structure

http://github.com/mautic/mautic

The project as seen from the outside and where PR’s are made against. Like it is today

http://github.com/mautic/app or mautic/core?

Git subtree split from the github.com/mautic/mautic/app folder. To be discussed if we need to change this to core.

http://github.com/mautic/core-recommended

Separate package to guarantee that all of the dependencies from mautic/core

http://github.com/mautic/core-composer-scaffold

Composer plugin to make sure we can have some mautic knowledge similar to https://github.com/nickveenhof/mautic-core-composer-scaffold

It would all come together in a project called http://github.com/mautic/recommended-project similar to https://github.com/nickveenhof/mautic-project

This means we have the following as required packages in recommended-project

"mautic/core-composer-scaffold": "^4.0"

"mautic/core-recommended": "^4.0"

Suggested folder structure

This also means that the following folders and files should be generated from within the scaffold resource folder in mautic/core

index.php (first time setup coming from app/assets/scaffold/files/index.php)
.htaccess (first time setup coming from app/assets/scaffold/files/.htaccess)
app → Core Mautic application coming from mautic/core
themes/contrib → themes downloaded by composer (public)
themes/contrib → themes downloaded by composer or custom written (private)
plugins/contrib → plugins downloaded by composer
plugins/custom → plugins from own packagists or custom code
media/ → all media files similar to today including the different folders
config/ → Configuration (user created)
vendor/ → All dependencies from composer

Alternative folder structures possible with composer

web/index.php (first time setup coming from app/assets/scaffold/files/index.php)
web/.htaccess (first time setup coming from app/assets/scaffold/files/.htaccess)
web/app → Core Mautic application coming from mautic/core
web/themes/contrib → themes downloaded by composer (public)
web/themes/contrib → themes downloaded by composer or custom written (private)
web/plugins/contrib → plugins downloaded by composer
web/plugins/custom → plugins from own packagists or custom code
web/media/ → all media files similar to today including the different folders
config/ → Configuration files
vendor/ → All dependencies from composer

This means the in the mautic/core (or mautic/app) we should also have folders such as app/plugins and app/themes where the core plugins and core themes live

Options considered

Action items

Outcome