Installing Composer Deps

Ok, let's install our Composer dependencies already! Go back to the Ansible composer module for reference. Then, find your playbook and add a new task with a poetic and flowery name: "Install Composer's dependencies":

Ok, boring name, but clear! Use the composer module, and set the one required option - working_dir - to {{ symfony_root_dir }}:

Hey, that variable is coming in handy!

Run that playbook!

ansible-playbook ansible/playbook.yml -i ansible/hosts.ini

It's running... running, installing Composer's dependencies and... explosion! Ah! So much red! Run!

Then... come back. Let's see what's going on. It looks like it was downloading stuff... if we move to /var/www/project on the VM and ls vendor/, yep, it was populated.

The problem was later - when one of Symfony's post-install tasks ran:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception, SensioGeneratorBundle does not exist.

Oh yea. By default, the composer module runs composer like this:

composer install --no-dev

This means that your require-dev dependencies from composer.json are not installed:

If you're deploying to production, you may want that: it gives you a slight performance boost. But in a Symfony 3 application, it makes things blow up! You can fix this by setting an environment variable... and we will do that later.

But, since this is a development machine, we probably do want the dev dependencies. To fix that, in the playbook, set no_dev to no:

Try the playbook now.

ansible-playbook ansible/playbook.yml -i ansible/hosts.ini

This time, I personally guarantee it'll work. In fact, I'm so confident, that if it doesn't work this time, I'll buy you a beer or your drink of choice if we meet in person. Yep, it's definitely going to work - I've never been so sure of anything in my entire life.

Ah! No! It blew up again! Find the culprit!

Attempted to load class "DOMDocument" from the global namespace.

Uh oh. I skipped past something I shouldn't have. When you download a new Symfony project, you can make sure your system is setup by running:

php bin/symfony_requirements

Your system is not ready to run Symfony projects.

Duh! The message - about the SimpleXML extension - means that we're missing an extension! In our playbook, find the task where we install PHP. Add another extension: php7.1-xml:

Run that playbook - hopefully - one last time:

ansible-playbook ansible/playbook.yml -i ansible/hosts.ini

Ya know, this is the great thing about Ansible. Sure, we might have forgotten to install an extension. But instead of installing it manually and forgetting all about it next time, it now lives permanently in our playbook. We'll never forget it again.

Phew! It worked! Go back to the VM and check out requirements again:

php bin/symfony_requirements

We're good! And most importantly, we can boot up our Symfony app via the console:

php bin/console

Our app is working! And there's just one last big step to get things running: configure NGINX with PHP-FPM and point it at our project. Let's go!