Installing Symfony

In the past, Symfony projects were created with Composer, the dependency manager for PHP applications. However, the current recommendation is to use the Symfony Installer, which has to be installed before creating your first project.

Read the Installing & Setting up the Symfony Framework article learn how to install and use the Symfony Installer.

Creating the Blog Application

Now that everything is correctly set up, you can create a new project based on Symfony. In your command console, browse to a directory where you have permission to create files and execute the following commands:

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$ cd projects/
$ symfony new blog

# Windows
c:\> cd projects/
c:\projects\> php symfony new blog

This command creates a new directory called blog that contains a fresh new project based on the most recent stable Symfony version available. In addition, the installer checks if your system meets the technical requirements to execute Symfony applications. If not, you'll see the list of changes needed to meet those requirements.

Structuring the Application

After creating the application, enter the blog/ directory and you'll see a number of files and directories generated automatically:

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blog/
├─ app/
│  ├─ config/
│  └─ Resources/
├─ bin
│  └─ console
├─ src/
│  └─ AppBundle/
├─ var/
│  ├─ cache/
│  ├─ logs/
│  └─ sessions/
├─ tests/
│  └─ AppBundle/
├─ vendor/
└─ web/

This file and directory hierarchy is the convention proposed by Symfony to structure your applications. The recommended purpose of each directory is the following:

• app/config/, stores all the configuration defined for any environment;
• app/Resources/, stores all the templates and the translation files for the application;
• src/AppBundle/, stores the Symfony specific code (controllers and routes), your domain code (e.g. Doctrine classes) and all your business logic;
• var/cache/, stores all the cache files generated by the application;
• var/logs/, stores all the log files generated by the application;
• var/sessions/, stores all the session files generated by the application;
• tests/AppBundle/, stores the automatic tests (e.g. Unit tests) of the application.
• vendor/, this is the directory where Composer installs the application's dependencies and you should never modify any of its contents;
• web/, stores all the front controller files and all the web assets, such as stylesheets, JavaScript files and images.

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blog/
├─ app/
│  ├─ config/
│  └─ Resources/
├─ bin/
│  └─ console
├─ src/
│  └─ AppBundle/
├─ tests/
│  └─ AppBundle/
├─ var/
│  ├─ cache/
│  ├─ logs/
   └─ sessions/
├─ vendor/
└─ web/
   ├─ app.php
   └─ app_dev.php

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$ php bin/console generate:bundle --namespace=AppBundle --dir=src --format=annotation --no-interaction

Extending the Directory Structure

If your project or infrastructure requires some changes to the default directory structure of Symfony, you can override the location of the main directories: cache/, logs/ and web/.