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Symfony Local Web Server

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Warning: You are browsing the documentation for Symfony 4.2, which is no longer maintained.

Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 6.1 (the current stable version).

Symfony Local Web Server

You can run Symfony applications with any web server (Apache, nginx, the internal PHP web server, etc.). However, Symfony provides its own web server to make you more productive while developing your applications.

Although this server is not intended for production use, it supports HTTP/2, TLS/SSL, automatic generation of security certificates, local domains, and many other features that sooner or later you'll need when developing web projects. Moreover, the server is not tied to Symfony and you can also use it with any PHP application and even with HTML/SPA (single page applications).

Installation

The Symfony server is distributed as a free installable binary and has support for Linux, macOS and Windows. Go to symfony.com/download and follow the instructions for your operating system.

Note

If you want to report a bug or suggest a new feature, please create an issue on symfony/cli.

Getting Started

The Symfony server is started once per project, so you may end up with several instances (each of them listening to a different port). This is the common workflow to serve a Symfony project:

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$ cd my-project/
$ symfony server:start

  [OK] Web server listening on http://127.0.0.1:....
  ...

# Now, browse the given URL, or run this command:
$ symfony open:local

Running the server this way makes it display the log messages in the console, so you won't be able to run other commands at the same time. If you prefer, you can run the Symfony server in the background:

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$ cd my-project/

# start the server in the background
$ symfony server:start -d

# continue working and running other commands...

# show the latest log messages
$ symfony server:log

Enabling TLS

Browsing the secure version of your applications locally is important to detect problems with mixed content early, and to run libraries that only run in HTTPS. Traditionally this has been painful and complicated to set up, but the Symfony server automates everything. First, run this command:

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$ symfony server:ca:install

This command creates a local certificate authority, registers it in your system trust store, registers it in Firefox (this is required only for that browser) and creates a default certificate for localhost and 127.0.0.1. In other words, it does everything for you.

Before browsing your local application with HTTPS instead of HTTP, restart its server stopping and starting it again.

Different PHP Settings Per Project

Selecting a Different PHP Version

If you have multiple PHP versions installed on your computer, you can tell Symfony which one to use creating a file called .php-version at the project root directory:

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$ cd my-project/

# use a specific PHP version
$ echo "7.2" > .php-version

# use any PHP 7.x version available
$ echo "7" > .php-version

Tip

The Symfony server traverses the directory structure up to the root directory, so you can create a .php-version file in some parent directory to set the same PHP version for a group of projects under that directory.

Run the command below if you don't remember all the PHP versions installed on your computer:

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$ symfony local:php:list

  # You'll see all supported SAPIs (CGI, FastCGI, etc.) for each version.
  # FastCGI (php-fpm) is used when possible; then CGI (which acts as a FastCGI
  # server as well), and finally, the server falls back to plain CGI.

Overriding PHP Config Options Per Project

You can change the value of any PHP runtime config option per project by creating a file called php.ini at the project root directory. Add only the options you want to override:

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$ cd my-project/

# this project only overrides the default PHP timezone
$ cat php.ini
[Date]
date.timezone = Asia/Tokyo

Running Commands with Different PHP Versions

When running different PHP versions it's useful to use the main symfony command as a wrapper for the php command. This allows you to always select the most appropriate PHP version according to the project which is running the commands. It also loads the env vars automatically, which is important when running non-Symfony commands:

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# runs the command with the default PHP version
$ php -r "..."

# runs the command with the PHP version selected by the project
# (or the default PHP version if the project didn't select one)
$ symfony php -r "..."

If you are using this wrapper frequently, consider aliasing the php command to it:

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$ cd ~/.symfony/bin
$ cp symfony php
# now you can run "php ..." and the "symfony" command will be executed instead

# other PHP commands can be wrapped too using this trick
$ cp symfony php-config
$ cp symfony pear
$ cp symfony pecl

Local Domain Names

By default, projects are accessible at some random port of the 127.0.0.1 local IP. However, sometimes it is preferable to associate a domain name to them:

  • It's more convenient when you work continuously on the same project because port numbers can change but domains don't;
  • The behavior of some applications depend on their domains/subdomains;
  • To have stable endpoints, such as the local redirection URL for Oauth2.

Setting up the Local Proxy

Local domains are possible thanks to a local proxy provided by the Symfony server. First, start the proxy:

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$ symfony proxy:start

If this is the first time you run the proxy, you must follow these additional steps:

  • Open the network configuration of your operating system;
  • Find the proxy settings and select the "Automatic Proxy Configuration";
  • Set the following URL as its value: http://127.0.0.1:7080/proxy.pac

Defining the Local Domain

By default, Symfony proposes .wip (for Work in Progress) for the local domains. You can define a local domain for your project as follows:

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$ cd my-project/
$ symfony proxy:domain:attach my-domain

If you have installed the local proxy as explained in the previous section, you can now browse https://my-domain.wip to access your local project with the new custom domain.

Tip

Browse the http://127.0.0.1:7080 URL to get the full list of local project directories, their custom domains, and port numbers.

When running console commands, add the HTTPS_PROXY env var to make custom domains work:

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$ HTTPS_PROXY=http://127.0.0.1:7080 curl https://my-domain.wip

Tip

If you prefer to use a different TLD, edit the ~/.symfony/proxy.json file (where ~ means the path to your user directory) and change the value of the tld option from wip to any other TLD.

Long-Running Commands

Long-running commands, such as the ones that compile front-end web assets, block the terminal and you can't run other commands at the same time. The Symfony server provides a run command to wrap them as follows:

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# compile Webpack assets using Symfony Encore ... but do that in the
# background to not block the terminal
$ symfony run -d yarn encore dev --watch

# continue working and running other commands...

# from time to time, check the command logs if you want
$ symfony server:log

# and you can also check if the command is still running
$ symfony server:status
Web server listening on ...
Command "yarn ..." running with PID ...

# stop the web server (and all the associated commands) when you are finished
$ symfony server:stop

Docker Integration

The local Symfony server provides full Docker integration for projects that use it. First, make sure to expose the container ports:

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# docker-compose.override.yaml
services:
    database:
        ports:
            - "3306"

    redis:
        ports:
            - "6379"

    # ...

Then, check your service names and update them if needed (Symfony creates environment variables following the name of the services so they can be autoconfigured):

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# docker-compose.yaml
services:
    # DATABASE_URL
    database: ...
    # MONGODB_DATABASE, MONGODB_SERVER
    mongodb: ...
    # REDIS_URL
    redis: ...
    # ELASTISEARCH_HOST, ELASTICSEARCH_PORT
    elasticsearch: ...
    # RABBITMQ_DSN
    rabbitmq: ...

If your docker-compose.yaml file doesn't use the environment variable names expected by Symfony (e.g. you use MYSQL_URL instead of DATABASE_URL) then you need to rename all occurrences of those environment variables in your Symfony application. A simpler alternative is to use the .env.local file to reassign the environment variables:

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# .env.local
DATABASE_URL=${MYSQL_URL}
# ...

Now you can start the containers and all their services will be exposed. Browse any page of your application and check the "Symfony Server" section in the web debug toolbar. You'll see that "Docker Compose" is "Up".

SymfonyCloud Integration

The local Symfony server provides full, but optional, integration with SymfonyCloud, a service optimized to run your Symfony applications on the cloud. It provides features such as creating environments, backups/snapshots, and even access to a copy of the production data from your local machine to help debug any issues.

Read SymfonyCloud technical docs.

Bonus Features

In addition to being a local web server, the Symfony server provides other useful features:

Looking for Security Vulnerabilities

Run the following command to check whether your project's dependencies contain any known security vulnerability:

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$ symfony security:check

A good security practice is to execute this command regularly to be able to update or replace compromised dependencies as soon as possible. The security check is done locally by cloning the public PHP security advisories database, so your composer.lock file is not sent on the network.

Tip

The security:check command terminates with a non-zero exit code if any of your dependencies is affected by a known security vulnerability. This way you can add it to your project build process and your continuous integration workflows to make them fail when there are vulnerabilities.

Creating Symfony Projects

In addition to the different ways of installing Symfony, you can use these commands from the Symfony server:

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# creates a new project based on symfony/skeleton
$ symfony new my_project_name

# creates a new project based on symfony/website-skeleton
$ symfony new --full my_project_name

# creates a new project based on the Symfony Demo application
$ symfony new --demo my_project_name

You can create a project depending on a development version as well (note that Composer will also set the stability to dev for all root dependencies):

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# creates a new project based on Symfony's master branch
$ symfony new --version=dev-master my_project_name

# creates a new project based on Symfony's 4.3 dev branch
$ symfony new --version=4.3.x-dev my_project_name
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