How to Create and Store a Symfony Project in Git

Warning: You are browsing the documentation for Symfony 2.x, which is no longer maintained.

Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 7.1 (the current stable version).

Tip

Though this article is specifically about Git, the same generic principles will apply if you're storing your project in Subversion.

Once you've read through Create your First Page in Symfony and become familiar with using Symfony, you'll no-doubt be ready to start your own project. In this article, you'll learn the best way to start a new Symfony project that's stored using the Git source control management system.

Initial Project Setup

To get started, you'll need to download Symfony and get things running. See the Installing & Setting up the Symfony Framework article for details.

Once your project is running, just follow these simple steps:

Initialize your Git repository:
```
1
```
```
$ git init
```
Add all of the initial files to Git:
```
1
```
```
$ git add .
```
Tip
As you might have noticed, not all files that were downloaded by Composer in step 1, have been staged for commit by Git. Certain files and folders, such as the project's dependencies (which are managed by Composer), parameters.yml (which contains sensitive information such as database credentials), log and cache files and dumped assets (which are created automatically by your project), should not be committed in Git. To help you prevent committing those files and folders by accident, the Standard Distribution comes with a file called .gitignore, which contains a list of files and folders that Git should ignore.

Tip
You may also want to create a .gitignore file that can be used system-wide. This allows you to exclude files/folders for all your projects that are created by your IDE or operating system. For details, see GitHub .gitignore.
Create an initial commit with your started project:
```
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```
```
$ git commit -m "Initial commit"
```

At this point, you have a fully-functional Symfony project that's correctly committed to Git. You can immediately begin development, committing the new changes to your Git repository.

You can continue to follow along with the Create your First Page in Symfony article to learn more about how to configure and develop inside your application.

Tip

The Symfony Standard Edition comes with some example functionality. To remove the sample code, follow the instructions in the "How to Remove a Bundle" article.

Managing Vendor Libraries with `composer.json`

How Does it Work?

Every Symfony project uses a group of third-party "vendor" libraries. One way or another the goal is to download these files into your vendor/ directory and, ideally, to give you some sane way to manage the exact version you need for each.

By default, these libraries are downloaded by running a composer install "downloader" binary. This composer file is from a library called Composer and you can read more about installing it in the Installation article.

The composer command reads from the composer.json file at the root of your project. This is an JSON-formatted file, which holds a list of each of the external packages you need, the version to be downloaded and more. composer also reads from a composer.lock file, which allows you to pin each library to an exact version. In fact, if a composer.lock file exists, the versions inside will override those in composer.json. To upgrade your libraries to new versions, run composer update.

Tip

If you want to add a new package to your application, run the composer require command:

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        $ composer require doctrine/doctrine-fixtures-bundle
    

To learn more about Composer, see GetComposer.org:

It's important to realize that these vendor libraries are not actually part of your repository. Instead, they're simply un-tracked files that are downloaded into the vendor/. But since all the information needed to download these files is saved in composer.json and composer.lock (which are stored in the repository), any other developer can use the project, run composer install, and download the exact same set of vendor libraries. This means that you're controlling exactly what each vendor library looks like, without needing to actually commit them to your repository.

So, whenever a developer uses your project, they should run the composer install script to ensure that all of the needed vendor libraries are downloaded.

Since Symfony is just a group of third-party libraries and third-party libraries are entirely controlled through composer.json and composer.lock, upgrading Symfony means simply upgrading each of these files to match their state in the latest Symfony Standard Edition.

Of course, if you've added new entries to composer.json, be sure to replace only the original parts (i.e. be sure not to also delete any of your custom entries).

Storing your Project on a remote Server

You now have a fully-functional Symfony project stored in Git. However, in most cases, you'll also want to store your project on a remote server both for backup purposes, and so that other developers can collaborate on the project.

The easiest way to store your project on a remote server is via a web-based hosting service like GitHub or Bitbucket. Of course, there are more services out there, you can start your research with a comparison of hosting services.

Alternatively, you can store your Git repository on any server by creating a barebones repository and then pushing to it. One library that helps manage this is Gitolite.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.

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