Setup Symfony

Setup Symfony

This example installs Symfony 7 inside the Devilbox PHP container and serves public/ through the standard Devilbox htdocs document root.

Overview

Project name	Container path	Database	TLD_SUFFIX	Project URL
my-symfony	/shared/httpd/my-symfony	optional	lvh.me	http://my-symfony.lvh.me / https://my-symfony.lvh.me

Projects live in /shared/httpd/ in the PHP container and in ./data/www/ on the host.

Prerequisites

• Devilbox with PHP 8.3 or PHP 8.4 available from env-example.
• Composer available in the PHP container.
• HTTPD and Bind services.

Start the stack:

./dvl.sh up php httpd bind

Caution

Symfony 7 requires modern PHP. Do not use old PHP 7 containers for this example.

Walk through

It will be ready in six steps:

1. Enter the PHP container.
2. Create a new virtual host directory.
3. Install Symfony 7.
4. Link public/ to htdocs.
5. Verify DNS.
6. Open the project.

1. Enter the PHP container

./dvl.sh shell php83

2. Create the vhost directory

mkdir -p /shared/httpd/my-symfony
cd /shared/httpd/my-symfony

3. Install Symfony 7

Use Composer for a web application skeleton:

composer create-project symfony/skeleton:^7.0 symfony
cd symfony
composer require webapp

Expected structure from /shared/httpd/my-symfony:

tree -L 1
.
└── symfony

4. Link the webroot

cd /shared/httpd/my-symfony
ln -s symfony/public htdocs

Expected structure:

tree -L 1
.
├── symfony
└── htdocs -> symfony/public

5. Verify DNS

my-symfony.lvh.me resolves to localhost by default. Add a hosts entry only when using a custom suffix.

6. Open your browser

Visit http://my-symfony.lvh.me or https://my-symfony.lvh.me.

Optional database setup

If your Symfony app needs MySQL, start MySQL and create a database:

./dvl.sh up mysql
./dvl.sh exec "mysql -u root -h 127.0.0.1 -p -e 'CREATE DATABASE my_symfony CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;'"

Then set DATABASE_URL in symfony/.env.local:

DATABASE_URL="mysql://root:[email protected]:3306/my_symfony?serverVersion=8.0&charset=utf8mb4"

Next steps

• Run Symfony console commands with ./dvl.sh exec "php bin/console" from the project directory.
• Add MySQL, Redis, or Messenger transports only when the application requires them.
• Configure local HTTPS trust for browser testing.