On Sunday 18 July 2010 in Symfony, PHP / AFUP

As a symfony developer and an Open Source fan, I would like to share the code source I produced for this weblog application. I left the source code in a Subversion repository hosted by Google Code. Feel free to checkout the code, to install the application and review the code I wrote. You will probably learn lots of good things and best practices. The content of this post explains how to install and run the application.

Introduction

You are about to install this symfony project. This is an Open Source application released under the MIT license that provides a weblog platform. The project is split in two applications: the frontend and the backend.

The frontend application is the interface dedicated to the public whereas the backend application hosts the weblog management.

Dependencies

This symfony project has several dependencies:

• PHP 5.2.4 or later
• Symfony 1.4.x framework
• sfDoctrineGuardPlugin
• sfFormExtraPlugin
• sfEasyMarkdownPlugin
• sfEasySyntaxHighlighterPlugin

Web Server Installation

To install this project, run the following command:

$ cd /path/to/web/root
$ mkdir blog
$ cd blog/
$ svn co http://symfony-blog.googlecode.com/svn/tags/RELEASE_0.9.0/ .

Create a virtual host in your httpd.conf or httpd-vhosts file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName sf-blog.local
  DocumentRoot "/path/to/web/root/blog/web"
  <Directory "/path/to/web/root/blog/web">
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All
  </Directory>
 
  Alias /sf /path/to/web/root/blog/lib/vendor/symfony/data/web/sf
  <Directory "/path/to/web/root/blog/lib/vendor/symfony/data/web/sf">
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Restart your Apache server and add the following entry to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 sf-blog.local

Configure Databases

First, you will need to configure at least two database connections. The first one is dedicated to the development and production environments. The second will host the test environment.

Configure your database connections in config/databases.yml file. The code below configures two MySQL connections.

test:
  doctrine:
    param:
      dsn:      mysql:host=localhost;dbname=blog_test
      username: my_username
      password: my_password
 
all:
  doctrine:
    class: sfDoctrineDatabase
    param:
      dsn:      mysql:host=localhost;dbname=blog
      username: my_prod_user
      password: secret

Configure the Frontend Application

Then, you will have to change some sensible defaults in the apps/frontend/config/app.yml file as described below:

test:
  bookmarks:
    max_in_sidebar:             3
 
all:
  available:
    cultures:                   [en, fr]         # Available Cultures
  contact:
    email:                      you@example.com  # Contact email
  feeds:
    author:                     John DOE         # Atom feeds author
    email:                      you@example.com  # Atom feeds email
  posts:
    max_per_page:               5     # Max posts per page
  comments:
    max_in_sidebar:             20    # Max comments in sidebar
  bookmarks:
    max_in_sidebar:             20    # Max bookmarks in sidebar
  blogroll:
    max_in_sidebar:             20    # Max blogroll links in sidebar

Update fixtures

Eventually, you can add more fixtures in data/fixtures/prod/*.yml files. The default administrator user is admin and password is secret. You can change this login and password in the data/fixtures/prod/sfGuardUser.yml file.

Build the Project

When your project is configured, run the following command to build everything:

$ cd /path/to/your/project
$ php symfony doctrine:build --all --env=test
$ php symfony doctrine:build --all --and-load="data/fixtures/prod/"

Run the Test Suite

To run the test suite, just execute the command below:

$ php symfony test:all

Deploy Web Assets

Run the following command to deploy plugins' assets:

$ php symfony plugin:publish-assets

Browse your Application

You can navigate the frontend application by browsing the following URIs:

http://sf-blog.local/frontend_dev.php
http://sf-blog.local/index.php

And the backend application with the following URIs:

http://sf-blog.local/backend_dev.php
http://sf-blog.local/backend.php