I am using my free account to evaluate Flarum forum software but installation of an extension I need fails because escapeshellarg is disabled. As this is an evaluation exercise only I was hoping to do it in my free account and move onto a paid account once we had decided which software we would use. I’m doing this on behalf of a volunteering organisation so we don’t want to spend money before we have to.
Is escapeshellarg (and other functions) enabled in paid accounts?
I can’t find any information about whether escapeshellarg() is enabled on premium or not, but I do know that iFastNet’s premium shared hosting doesn’t have SSH access, only the business plans do.
However, may I ask what extension it is you’re trying to install? You should be able to install extensions without composer or shell access using the Flarum extension manager. Depending on the extension there may be an alternative way to install it.
As far as I can tell, the problem is not such much that escapeshellarg is disabled, but that Flarum Extension Manager uses the Composer command under the hood to install extensions. And running system commands on free hosting is not possible, so that won’t work.
On premium hosting, running system commands is disabled by default for your own safety, but you can easily enable it through cPanel.
Well I have used Flarum Extension Manager to successfully install other Flarum extensions so for those at least, using Composer under the hood doesn’t seem to be an issue.
TBH - I’m not sufficiently technical to be able to take this any further. Whether it’s Composer or escapsehellarg which is disallowed makes no difference - the end result is the same. I can’t install and run the extension I need so it makes it a non-starter to host the forum on your platform. Too bad, but there are other places I can try.