Prerequisites¶

Before creating a Symfony application, make sure you have installed the following software:

PHP 8.0+
PHP Composer
Symfony CLI
An text editor or IDE
Docker

Installing PHP and Composer¶

For most Linux users, PHP are available in the official repository, install it directly via the system built-in package management tools.

For Windows users, to manage your softwares as Linux users, install Chocolatey firstly.

To install PHP 8 and PHP Composer, open a terminal and run the following command.

$ choco php composer

To verify the installation, run the following command.

$  php -v
PHP 8.1.2 (cli) (built: Jan 19 2022 10:13:52) (NTS Visual C++ 2019 x64)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.1.2, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies

$ composer -V
Composer version 2.1.12 2021-11-09 16:02:04

Installing Symfony CLI¶

For Linux users, follow the installation guide in the Symfony Download page to install it into your system.

For Windows users, Symfony CLI is not available in the Chocolatey repository, if you are using scoop or gofish, follow the instruction in the Symfony Download page to install it directly. Else download a copy to your system, add its localtion to the System environment variable PATH.

Open a terminal, run the following command to test if it is available in the PATH.

$ symfony -V

 INFO  A new Symfony CLI version is available (5.3.4, currently running 5.3.3).

       If you installed the Symfony CLI via a package manager, updates are going to be automatic.
       If not, upgrade by downloading the new version at https://github.com/symfony-cli/symfony-cli/releases
       And replace the current binary (symfony.exe) by the new one.

Symfony CLI version 5.3.3 (c) 2017-2022 Symfony SAS (2022-02-04T15:07:05Z - stable)

Checking System Requirements¶

Run the following command to check if your PHP environment satisfices the requirements to run a Symfony application.

# symfony check:requirements

Symfony Requirements Checker
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

> PHP is using the following php.ini file:
C:\tools\php80\php.ini

> Checking Symfony requirements:

....................WWW.........


 [OK]                                         
 Your system is ready to run Symfony projects 


Optional recommendations to improve your setup
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 * intl extension should be available
   > Install and enable the intl extension (used for validators).

 * a PHP accelerator should be installed
   > Install and/or enable a PHP accelerator (highly recommended).

 * realpath_cache_size should be at least 5M in php.ini
   > Setting "realpath_cache_size" to e.g. "5242880" or "5M" in
   > php.ini* may improve performance on Windows significantly in some
   > cases.


Note  The command console can use a different php.ini file
~~~~  than the one used by your web server.
      Please check that both the console and the web server
      are using the same PHP version and configuration.

Open the php.ini file, adjust the configuration according to the above recommendations info.

If you are not familiar with PHP configuration, backup php.ini firstly before doing modification.

And we will use Postgres as database in the sample application, make sure pdo_pgsql and pgsql modules are enabled.

Finally, to show all enabled PHP modules, run:

$ php -m

[PHP Modules]
bcmath
calendar
Core
ctype
curl
date
dom
filter
hash
iconv
json
libxml
mbstring
mysqlnd
openssl
pcre
PDO
pdo_pgsql
pgsql
Phar
readline
Reflection
session
SimpleXML
SPL
standard
tokenizer
xml
xmlreader
xmlwriter
zip
zlib

[Zend Modules]

PHP Editor or IDE¶

Install a text editor or IDE to code PHP, there are some options:

VSCode + PHP extensions
NetBeans IDE includes excellent PHP support
IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition or PHPStorm
Eclipse with PHP plugins installed

Everything is ready now. In the next section, we will create a Symfony project.