Use/support public/ folder for Contao Managed Edition

[fritzmg]

Since Symfony 4.4, in a regular Symfony application you would have support for the following structure:

App	Bundle
config/	config/
public/	public/
src/	src/
templates/	templates/
translations/	translations/

Basically, everything in the bundle is consistent with the application itself.

After this PR is merged, the Contao Managed Edition would support the following:

App	Bundle
config/	config/
contao/	contao/
web/	public/
src/	src/
templates/	templates/
translations/	translations/

So only the web/ folder would be inconsistent with the regular Symfony application and bundle structure.

I know this has been discussed in the past and it was decided against it - mostly to not cause more confusion within the community (I think?). But due to the recent PR I would like to bring it up and discuss it again :)

[aschempp]

As far as I know, you can use a different folder and configure the application accordingly? There should be a property in the contao bundle config.

[fritzmg]

Yep, there is.

contao:
  web_dir: %kernel.project_dir%/web

However, the question is, if the default should be changed to public/, for consistency with current Symfony best-practices and standards.

[contaoacademy]

Does this mean that the domain root would have to be set to /mypath/public?

[leofeyer]

I am up for renaming the web/ folder to public/ in Contao 4.9. Not sure about the upgrade path though - how would you upgrade from Contao 4.4 to 4.9 then?

@contao/developers /cc

[Toflar]

We can't. It would require to change the DirectoryIndex of your server configuration. I don't see any value. At all.

[leofeyer]

Renaming the directory has the same benefit as deprecating the /app/Resources/config directory in favour of the /config directory. We did not have to do this, either, however we wanted to adjust to the Symfony standards. 🤷‍♂

[Toflar]

What? We're talking web/index.php to public/index.php here, right? How is that related to /app/Resources?

[leofeyer]

Both are non-required changes that do not have to be done, because the "old" way works just fine. Still we now support the config/ directory and we have deprecated app/Resources/config/, which has no benefit except adjusting to the Symfony standards.

But switching from web/ to public/ suddenly needs more benefits than that?

[Toflar]

app/Resources/config to config can be migrated automatically. The DirectoryIndex of the webserver cannot.

[leofeyer]

That's true. Still we should think of an upgrade path so we can change this in a future version, don't you think?

[Toflar]

I don't think we can. The only way that would work would be to have the public directory alongside the web directory and that again would mean we have to map everything that's generated into web or public vice-versa.

The only option for me here is a hard break. Either we do that in 4.9 LTS or 4.10.

Also note that we cannot just rename a config value because unfortunately there's still quite a few places where web is hardcoded. Examples include:

• Calendar::generateFeed()
• News::generateFiles()

[aschempp]

This cannot be changed in 4.9 because of lots of (potential) BC breaks. We can discuss this for 4.10 imho, maybe someone can come up with a clever way (like symlinking web to public 😉 )

[contaoacademy]

Is this change really strategically so great? A lot of blog posts, videos and forum posts would no longer fit.

Especially for inexperienced users there will be a lot of confusion...

[leofeyer]

+1 for a hard break in Contao 4.10 then.

[m-vo]

I'd rather be able to configure it. So for new projects it would be public to be in line with the symfony docs but web for existing ones. I don't see any benefit in the BC break. 🤷‍♂️

If we want to change the default, I'd still vote for a config option so that noone is forced to change their server and deployment settings.

[Toflar]

You can configure it already. Fixing the mentioned hardcoded ones should be an easy-pick.

[leofeyer]

I have removed the hardcoded paths in #1116.

[kroerig]

I'd rather be able to configure it. So for new projects it would be public to be in line with the symfony docs but web for existing ones. I don't see any benefit in the BC break. 🤷‍♂

If we want to change the default, I'd still vote for a config option so that noone is forced to change their server and deployment settings.

Perhaps you could implement a migration tool in Contao-Manager.

[leofeyer]

As discussed in Mumble on March, 12th, the Contao Manager knows how the user has named its parent directory and could store this in the container. Then it would make no difference how the users name their public directory, as it would be set correctly by the Manager (similar to how it is set to web in the current Symfony Flex recipe).

The default in Contao 4.10 should be public. If a web folder exists, public should be a symlink to web.