It makes sense to design it to be installed like that, my problem is it doesn't seem to be designed for automated setup. It was originally Personal Home Page, and feels like it started as the kind of thing you'd run on a long-running server you SSH into and mess with manually, with lots of stuff built yourself and all designed to work together.
Other languages feel a bit more at home in a "Servers can be remade instantly from declarative config, manually making changes on a production server isn't a thing, and software is full of lots of third party pieces" environment, but then again, maybe I just don't use PHP enough to understand the idioms and ecosystem and there's solutions I don't know about.
Other languages feel a bit more at home in a "Servers can be remade instantly from declarative config, manually making changes on a production server isn't a thing, and software is full of lots of third party pieces" environment, but then again, maybe I just don't use PHP enough to understand the idioms and ecosystem and there's solutions I don't know about.