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01.

Setting up with the Symfony Local Web Server

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Yo friends! It's file upload time! Woo! We are going to absolutely crush this topic... yea know... because file uploads are a critical part of the Internet. Where would we be if we couldn't upload selfies... or videos of Victor's cat... or SPAM our friends with memes!?!?! That's not a world I want to live in.

But... is uploading a file really that hard: add a file input to a form, submit, move the file onto your filesystem and... done! Meme unlocked! Well... that's true... until you start thinking about storing files in the cloud, like S3. Oh, and don't forget to add validation to make sure a user can't upload any file type - like an executable or PHP script! And you'll need to make sure the filename is unique so it doesn't overwrite other files... but also... it's kind of nice to keep the original filename... so it's not just some random hash if the user downloads it later. Oh, and once it's uploaded, we'll need a way to link to that file... except if you need to do a security check before letting the user download the file. Then you'll need to handle things in a totally different way.

Um... so wow! Things got complex! That's awesome! Because we're going to attack all of this... and more.

Downloading the Course Code

If you want to upload the maximum knowledge into your brain... you should definitely download the course code from this page and code along with me. After unzipping the file, you'll find a start/ directory that has the same code you see here. Open the README.md file for all the setup details... and a few extras.

The last setup step in our tutorials is usually to open a terminal, move into the project and run:

php bin/console server:run

to start the built in web server. You can totally do this. But, but, but! I want to show you a new tool that I'm loving: the Symfony local web server.

Downloading the Symfony Local Web Server

Find your browser and go to https://symfony.com/download. The Symfony local web server - or Symfony "client" - is a single, standalone file that is full of superpowers. At the top, you'll see instructions about how to download it. These steps are different depending on your operating system - but it should auto-select the right one.

For me, I'll copy this curl command, find my terminal, paste and enter! This downloaded a single executable file called symfony. To make sure I can type that command from anywhere, I'll move this into a global bin directory. By the way, you only need to do these steps once on your computer... so you're done forever!

Unless we've mucked things up, we should now be able to run this from anywhere: try it!

symfony

Say hello to the Symfony CLI! It lists the most popular commands, but there are a lot more - run:

symfony help

Woh. We'll talk more about this tool in another tutorial. But, to start a local web server, just say:

symfony serve

Ah. The first time you run this, you'll get an error about running: symfony server:ca:install. Let's do that:

symfony server:ca:install

You'll probably need to type in your admin password. This command installs a local SSL certificate authority... which is awesome because when we run symfony serve, it creates a local web server that supports https! Woh! We get free https locally! Sweet!

Find your browser and go to https://127.0.0.1:8000 - or localhost, it's the same thing. Say hello to The SpaceBar! This is the app we've been building in our Symfony 4 series: a news site for space-traveling friends from across the galaxy.

Try logging in with admin1@thespacebar.com and password engage. Then go to /admin/article.

This is the admin section for the articles on the site. Each article has an image... but until now, that image has basically been hardcoded. Click to edit one of the articles. Our first goal is clear: add a file upload field to this form so we can upload the article image, and then render that on the frontend.

But we're going to keep things simple to start... and take a deep and wonderful look into the fundamentals of how files are uploaded on the web and how that looks inside Symfony. Let's go!