Installation

Install the plugin

With your license added to the License Manager, install through GPM like any other plugin:

bin/gpm install forum-pro

You can also install it from Admin → Plugins. Once enabled, Forum Pro adds a Forum entry to the admin sidebar and registers its own CLI commands under bin/plugin forum-pro.

Turn on the frontend

The public forum is off by default so that installing the plugin never exposes routes before you are ready. Enable it in Admin → Plugins → Forum Pro → General, or in user/config/plugins/forum-pro.yaml:

frontend:
  enabled: true
  route: /forum

Visit /forum. On SQLite the schema migrates itself on first use and the forum is live immediately.

Database setup

SQLite (the default)

Nothing to configure. The database is created at user/data/forum-pro/db/forum.sqlite and deny-all protection files are written next to it.

location ~* /user/data/forum-pro/ { deny all; }

MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL

Point the database block at your server:

database:
  type: mysql          # sqlite | mysql | pgsql
  mysql:
    host: localhost
    port: 3306
    dbname: grav_forum
    username: forum
    password: '...'

database:
  type: pgsql
  pgsql:
    host: localhost
    port: 5432
    dbname: grav_forum
    username: forum
    password: '...'
    sslmode: prefer

If you already use the Database plugin, you can reference one of its named connections instead of repeating credentials:

database:
  connection: my-named-connection

The identical schema and the identical migrations run on all three engines. Forum Pro's CI runs the full test suite against SQLite, MySQL 8 and PostgreSQL 16 on PHP 8.3 and 8.4.

Migration policy

auto_migrate: sqlite-only    # auto | sqlite-only | manual

• sqlite-only (default) applies pending migrations automatically on SQLite, and requires a manual run everywhere else.
• auto applies them automatically on every engine.
• manual never applies them automatically.

Migrations take a database run-lock, so two concurrent requests can never apply the same step twice. Apply them by hand with:

bin/plugin forum-pro migrate --status   # preview what would run
bin/plugin forum-pro migrate            # apply

The background worker

Forum Pro defers real work to the Grav scheduler: email delivery, badge awards, retention purges, session cleanup, view-count folding, the moderator digest and the scheduled spam scans all run there. Add the scheduler to your crontab:

* * * * * cd /path/to/grav && bin/grav scheduler 1>> /dev/null 2>&1

The Status tab in the admin prints the exact line for your install, including the right PHP binary, and reports whether the scheduler has been seen recently.

You can also drain the queue once by hand, which is useful when debugging:

bin/plugin forum-pro work

Mounting the forum

By default the forum lives at frontend.route (/forum). To mount it somewhere else, including the site root, create a page and give it the Forum page type. The forum takes over that page's route.

Three rules make this safe:

1. Real site pages always win over forum routes, so an existing page at the same path keeps rendering normally.
2. /forum keeps working when no mount page exists.
3. A home-mounted forum coexists with the rest of your site. Your blog, your docs and your landing pages are unaffected.

Reserved routes

With auth.enabled (the default), Forum Pro serves its own account system under routes reserved beneath the forum root:

Set your trusted site URL

Password-reset and email-verification links are built from an absolute base URL. Pin it explicitly in production so that a spoofed Host header cannot redirect a reset link to an attacker:

security:
  site_url: 'https://example.com'

If it is empty, Forum Pro falls back to system.custom_base_url, then to the request host with a logged warning.

Next steps

Open Admin → Forum → Structure and create your first section and category, then work through Configuration.