Installing and running above webroot

Statamic comes bundled with everything in the root folder, intended to be placed directly in your webroot. This makes it easier to just drop your site into a server and be on your way.

While things like .htaccess and nginx.conf files can ensure important files aren’t accessible, it’s always possible that those things are forgotten or misconfigured. Taking the extra step to place the folders out of reach entirely will give you that additional peace of mind.

tl;dr Here’s a summary of the steps.

Move the files

Out of the box, you’ll see something like this: (some things left out for brevity)

assets/
local/
site/
statamic/
index.php
please
.htaccess
.gitignore

The webroot will be wherever index.php is. You should ensure that the folders are located one level above, like this:

local/
public/
|-- assets/
|-- index.php
|-- .htaccess
site/
statamic/
please
.gitignore

In our example, the public folder will be the webroot.

Web accessible files

The default Statamic folder structure can safely assume everything will be accessible. Now its not the case, so some things will need to be adjusted.

Your themes folder and any public assets will likely need to be web-accessible if you plan on accessing them. That’s logical, right? We recommend moving them into a location like the following, but of course you may move them wherever you want:

public/
|-- assets/
|-- themes/
|   |-- your-theme/
`-- index.php

Let Statamic know where everything went

The statamic folder

The index.php file needs to know where the statamic folder is located. Now that it has been moved, you’ll need to update it.

Open the index.php file, and update the $statamic variable.

By default it is ./statamic (meaning the same directory level), and in our example, we’d update it to ../statamic (meaning up one level).

Everything else

Now that the folders have been moved, you’ll need to tell Statamic where they are.

We’ve organized Statamic into different filesystems to make file management a breeze. We’ve written a whole article about it, if you’re interested in learning more.

Within that article, it explains how to adjust the locations of your folders. In short, you’ll want to adjust the root and url values for each filesystem in site/settings/system.yaml to correspond with their new locations.

You’ll also want to update your asset container path and url values, which can be done in site/content/assets/[container-name].yaml.

Summary

1. Move system folders above webroot.
2. Ensure web accessible files are left in the webroot. (assets, site/themes, index.php, etc.)
3. Adjust the $statamic path variable in index.php.
4. Adjust filesystem references.
5. Adjust the asset container’s path.