![[Important]](/media/com_docimport/admonition/important.png) | Important |
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This is a Joomla!™ feature for EXPERT USERS ONLY. If you are not an expert, you MUST NOT use this feature. It makes managing sites harder, and is incompatible with many popular third party extensions. |
The custom public folder feature has been added to Joomla!™ in version 5.0. In short, it allows you to place your Joomla installation (Joomla's files, including its core files and third party extension files) outside the web root (the directory from which your site is served by the web server).
We will give three examples:
On a commercial host, your web root is directory similar to
/home/myuser/public_html. You can put your Joomla
installation in the directory
/home/myuser/joomla, without creating a subdomain which will be
served from the /home/myuser/joomla directory.
Your site will be served from the web root folder,
/home/myuser/public_html.
On a custom server running Debian or Ubuntu Server, your web
root is typically the directory /var/www/html.
You can put your Joomla installation in the directory
/opt/joomla. This site will still be served from
/var/www/html.
On a macOS local server, your web root is typically
/Users/myuser/Sites. You can put your Joomla
installation in the directory
/Users/myuser/development/joomla. This site will
still be served from /Users/myuser/Sites.
This feature works by creating symbolic links (typically called symlinks) in the web root directory, pointing to the absolutely necessary files to serve your site inside the installation directory.
![[Warning]](/media/com_docimport/admonition/warning.png) | Warning |
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This feature is NOT compatible with Windows. Even though you can create Folder Junctions and Symbolic Links on Windows, PHP lacks the capability for doing so. As a result, neither Joomla, nor Akeeba Kickstart, can restore these symlinks, making it impossible to use this feature on Windows. |
Creating a new installation with a custom public folder
Extract Joomla into its own folder, outside the web root. For example:
cd /opt/joomla wget "https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/releases/download/5.0.0-rc2/Joomla_5.0.0-rc2-Release_Candidate-Update_Package.zip" unzip Joomla_5.0.0-rc2-Release_Candidate-Update_Package.zip rm Joomla_5.0.0-rc2-Release_Candidate-Update_Package.zip
Then, install Joomla! using the command line. For example:
cd /opt/joomla/installation php ./joomla.php install --site-name="Joomla 5" \ --admin-user="John Q. Public" --admin-username=johnqpublic \ --admin-password="MfDQmqXYBwnwuBLwyepeFU4A" --admin-email="[email protected]" \ --db-type=mysql --db-encryption=0 --db-host=localhost --db-user=j5user \ --db-pass="yZE2cSGZuCgh8GPSVKS3ZtHY" --db-name=j5 --db-prefix=j5_ \ --public-folder=/var/www/html
Changing an existing installation to use a custom public folder
You need to move the site's files to the installation folder outside the web root, then use Joomla's command-line application to create the public folder. For example:
cd /opt/joomla mv /var/www/html/* . rm -rf /var/www/html/.well-known rm -rf /var/www/html/.ht* cd cli php ./joomla site:create-public-folder --public-folder=/var/www/html