Creating the Project

Version: 4.2
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Creating the Project

Installing Symfony

Best Practice

Use Composer and Symfony Flex to create and manage Symfony applications.

Composer is the package manager used by modern PHP applications to manage their dependencies. Symfony Flex is a Composer plugin designed to automate some of the most common tasks performed in Symfony applications. Using Flex is optional but recommended because it improves your productivity significantly.

Best Practice

Use the Symfony Skeleton to create new Symfony-based projects.

The Symfony Skeleton is a minimal and empty Symfony project which you can base your new projects on. Unlike past Symfony versions, this skeleton installs the absolute bare minimum amount of dependencies to make a fully working Symfony project. Read the Installing & Setting up the Symfony Framework article to learn more about installing Symfony.

Creating the Blog Application

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/
$ composer create-project symfony/skeleton blog

This command creates a new directory called blog that contains a fresh new project based on the most recent stable Symfony version available.

Tip

The technical requirements to run Symfony are simple. If you want to check if your system meets those requirements, read Requirements for Running Symfony.

Structuring the Application

After creating the application, enter the blog/ directory and you'll see a number of files and directories generated automatically. These are the most important ones:

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blog/
├─ bin/
│  └─ console
├─ config/
└─ public/
│  └─ index.php
├─ src/
│  └─ Kernel.php
├─ var/
│  ├─ cache/
│  └─ log/
└─ vendor/

This file and directory hierarchy is the convention proposed by Symfony to structure your applications. It's recommended to keep this structure because it's easy to navigate and most directory names are self-explanatory, but you can override the location of any Symfony directory:

Application Bundles

When Symfony 2.0 was released, most developers naturally adopted the symfony 1.x way of dividing applications into logical modules. That's why many Symfony applications used bundles to divide their code into logical features: UserBundle, ProductBundle, InvoiceBundle, etc.

But a bundle is meant to be something that can be reused as a stand-alone piece of software. If UserBundle cannot be used "as is" in other Symfony applications, then it shouldn't be its own bundle. Moreover, if InvoiceBundle depends on ProductBundle, then there's no advantage to having two separate bundles.

Best Practice

Don't create any bundle to organize your application logic.

Symfony applications can still use third-party bundles (installed in vendor/) to add features, but you should use PHP namespaces instead of bundles to organize your own code.

Next: Configuration

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