How do I install other applications alongside Laravel?

I'm building a website in Laravel 5.2 and rather than building a forum from scratch, I wish to install one such as SMF.

Laravel is currently in the root directory of my web server and I wish to keep it there as I wish to install SMF in a folder.

For example: www.example.com/smf

I'm thinking to install it in Laravel's /public folder but I'm afraid they will they conflict with each other. Is the /publicfolder the correct place to install SMF and should I use a route to point to the SMF folder?

Server: D.O droplet via Laravel Forge

Solution

You need to add custom rules for the folder(s) you want to use before Laravel related rules:

location /smf/index.php(/.*)?$ {        
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(/smf/index.php)(/.+)$;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 1000;
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
    include fastcgi_params;
}
location /smf/ { 
    if (!-e $request_filename) {
            rewrite ^.*$ /smf/index.php last;    
        }
    try_files $uri $uri/ smf/index.php?args; 
}

Please look for sample nginx config file here.