Public folder in a subdirectory on staging / prod breaks Nova

[arkoe]

• Laravel Version: 9.11
• Nova Version: 4.0
• PHP Version: 8.1
• Database Driver & Version: MySQL
• Operating System and Version: CentOS
• Browser type and version: Any

Description:

Whenever you access Nova in a subdirectory, for example: https://staging.mydomain.com/myproject/admin it redirect you to https://staging.mydomain.com/myproject/myproject/admin/login. Whatever the URL is after the TLD, it will just add it towards the URL.

For example, if the URL would've been: https://staging.mydomain.com/this/is/a/test/admin it will redirect you to https://staging.mydomain.com/this/is/a/test/this/is/a/test/admin/login

After moving the project to an actual domain name such as https://www.myproject.com everything works as expected.

Detailed steps to reproduce the issue on a fresh Nova installation:

2 options:

1. After a fresh installation, move the public folder 1 or more subdirectories deeper (change the relative paths in server.php and public/index.php)
2. Move the whole applications some layers deep.

Basically any configuration where you can't access the application in the domains root.

[crynobone]

Although there few articles guiding installation on subdirectory for Laravel this usage is not officially supported by Laravel. Convert this to community's discussion.

[davidhemphill]

What @crynobone is saying is that running Laravel in a subdirectory, while it might work, is considered an antipattern by Taylor himself, and as such we don't offer support for Nova configurations using this pattern. We'll be glad to change how Nova works if things change upstream.

[arkoe]

I see, thanks @davidhemphill . Would that mean that creating a subdomain using DirectAdmin for example, is also not possible for a Laravel application using Nova? Since it essentially is a subfolder within a root domain. Or am I misunderstanding?

[davidhemphill]

I'm not sure as I'm not familiar with DirectAdmin, but if the base URL for Nova is /nova (or whatever you set it to) is the first segment, it should work fine.

[brgmn]

@davidhemphill We bought Laravel Nova and thought it would run out-of-the-box in a subdirectory - e.g. domain.test/app/nova (respecting Laravels APP_URL and APP_DIR-environment variables - /app in this case). There's no technical reason why this shouldn't work. Now we have the same problem with Nova doing strange "double redirects" when trying to login. I think this is a bug/missing feature in Inertia (see inertiajs/inertia-laravel#503) that could be easily used to support subdirectory-NOVA-installations. So my wish would be that you folks try to push that inertia-pull-request and just update Nova to the newest version (allowing us subfolder-customers to get it up running). That would be great and I could continue recommending Nova to my large enterprise customers. Thanks!

[brgmn]

Btw. A common use case is large enterprises is that they have an old application running (legacy php or old cms) and want to migrate to Laravel step by step (redirecting parts of the software to the new /app powered by Laravel). That's where this subdirectory-requirement comes from. It's not by design, but in most cases you can't just replace the whole application in one step.