The version of Symfony in this example is end of life. Check our example with Symfony 6.

Autogit: Symfony Example

This repository show you step by step how you can deploy a Symfony app to Combell hosting using the Autogit feature.

• Introduction
• Create project
• Git setup
• .autogit.yml
• Document root
• Deployment hooks
  • Composer
  • Shared files and folders
• Deployment

Introduction

All software projects benefit from a system like Git. Git is used to track changes of code over time. You keep track of changes by performing commits and some commits contain new features or bugfixes.

Since your Git repository now contains new versions of your project after commits, you can use it to create releases.

With the Autogit feature of Combell, deploying is as simple as pushing your commits to a repository hosted on the Combell servers.

Create project

Create a new Symfony project using composer.

composer create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition myproject
cd myproject

Git setup

Initialize a Git repository in the new folder and register the Combell Git remote.

The exact location of the repository is shown in the control panel, in this case it is "domainbe@ssh.domain.be:auto.git".

git init .
git add .
git commit -m "composer create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition"
git remote add combell domainbe@ssh.domain.be:auto.git

.autogit.yml

Copy over the .autogit.yml file and add it to the repository.

scp domainbe@ssh.domain.be:autogit.yml.example .autogit.yml
git add .autogit.yml
git commit -m "Add the default .autogit.yml template"

Document root

Symfony uses web as the document root, but Combell looks for the www folder. Luckily for us, Git supports symlinks in the repository.

ln -s web www
git add www
git commit -m "Symlink the www folder to the web folder (combell www -> symfony web)"

Deployment hooks

When we push to the remote, our .gitignore file excludes the vendor/ directory we need to run the application in production. We would also like the log and session files to survive new releases.

Composer

After the shared symlinks are created in the new release folder, we want to run composer install

diff --git a/.autogit.yml b/.autogit.yml
index ad503f9..1ddac5b 100644
--- a/.autogit.yml
+++ b/.autogit.yml
@@ -34,7 +34,8 @@ hooks:
 #                present at every release (config, logs, ...)
   sharedsymlink_before: |
     exit 0
-  sharedsymlink_after: | 
+  sharedsymlink_after: |
+    SYMFONY_ENV=prod composer install --no-dev --classmap-authoritative
     exit 0
 
 # SYMLINK: Set current symlink to newest release

And add it to the repository

git commit -am "Run 'composer install' after the shared symlinks are created"

Shared files and folders

The database (and other) settings in Symfony are stored in app/config/parameters.yml. The var/ directory contains log files, session files and caches.

We can register those in .autogit.yml:

diff --git a/.autogit.yml b/.autogit.yml
index 4ab5c46..722b24b 100644
--- a/.autogit.yml
+++ b/.autogit.yml
@@ -13,8 +13,9 @@
 #######################################################################################
 
 # Example shared files and folders:
-# shared_files: [ etc/config.yml ]
-# shared_folders: [ var/log ]
+shared_files:
+  - app/config/parameters.yml
+shared_folders: [ var ]

And add it to the repository

git commit -am "Add the parameters file and var directory to shared objects"

When we symlink the var/ directory, we need to delete it from the git repository (or the symlink will error out).

We could remove it from the repository, but we can also remove it from the release folder during deployment:

diff --git a/.autogit.yml b/.autogit.yml
index 37fdc61..eca3762 100644
--- a/.autogit.yml
+++ b/.autogit.yml
@@ -29,6 +29,7 @@ hooks:
   install_before: |
     exit 0
   install_after: |
+    rm -Rf var/ # Get rid of the git var folder
     exit 0
 
 # SHAREDSYMLINK: Create symlink to shared files and folders
@@ -36,6 +37,9 @@ hooks:
   sharedsymlink_before: |
     exit 0
   sharedsymlink_after: |
+    mkdir -p var/cache
+    mkdir -p var/logs
+    mkdir -p var/sessions
     SYMFONY_ENV=prod composer install --no-dev --classmap-authoritative --prefer-dist
     exit 0

And add it to the repository

git commit -am "Remove the git var/ folder and recreate the subdirs when the shared symlink has been created"

Deployment

git push combell master