Setting up our Symfony App

Welcome to the first Symfony 7 tutorial! My name is Ryan - I live here in the fantasy world of Symfonycasts and... I am beyond excited to be your guide through this series all about Symfony, web development... bad jokes... space animations, and most importantly, building real things we can be proud of. For me, it feels like I'm the lucky person that gets to give you a personal tour of the Enterprise... or whatever nerdy thing gets you most excited.

And that's because, I love this stuff. Bootstrapping databases, building beautiful user interfaces, writing high-quality code... it gets me out of bed in the morning. And Symfony is the best tool to do all of this... and become a better developer along the way.

And that's really my goal: I want you to enjoy all of this as much as I do ... and to feel empowered to build all the amazing things you have floating around in your mind.

What Makes Symfony Special

Now, one of my favorite things about teaching Symfony is that our project is going to start tiny. That makes it easy to learn. But then, it'll scale up automatically as we need more tools via a unique recipe system. Symfony is actually a collection of over 200 small PHP libraries. So that's a ton of tools... but we get to choose what we need.

Because, you might be building a pure API... or a full web app, which is what we'll focus on in this tutorial. Though, if you are building an API, follow the first few tutorials in this series, then pop over to our API Platform tutorials. API Platform is a mind-blowingly fun & powerful system for making APIs, built right on top of Symfony.

Symfony is also blazingly fast, has long-term support versions and works a lot on creating a delightful developer experience while keeping to programming best-practices. This means we get to write high-quality code and still get our work done quickly.

Ok, enough of me gushing about Symfony. Ready to get to work? Then beam aboard.

Installing the Symfony Binary

And head over to https://symfony.com/download. This page has instructions on how to download a standalone binary called symfony. Now this is not Symfony itself... it's just a little tool that'll help us do things, like start new Symfony projects, run a local web server or even deploy our app to production.

Once you've downloaded and installed it, open a terminal and move into any directory. Check that the symfony binary is ready to go by running:

symfony --help

It's got a bunch of commands, but we'll just need a few. Before we start a project, also run

symfony check:req

which stands for check requirements. This makes sure that we have everything on our system needed to run Symfony, like PHP at the correct version and some PHP extensions.

Once this is happy, we can start a new project! Do it with symfony new and then a directory name. I'll call mine starshop. More on that later.

symfony new starshop

This will give us a tiny project with only the base things installed. Then, we'll add more stuff little-by-little along the way. It's gonna be great! But later, when you feel comfortable with Symfony, if you want to get started more quickly, you can run the same command, but with --webapp to get a project with much more stuff pre-installed.

Anyway, move into the directory - cd starshop - then I'll type ls to check things out. Cool! We'll get to know these files in the next chapter, but this is our project... and it's already working!

Starting the symfony Web Server

To see it working in a browser, we need to start a web server. You can use any web server you want - Apache, Nginx, Caddy, whatever. But for local development, I highly recommend using the symfony binary we just installed. Run:

symfony serve

The first time you do this, it might ask you to run another command to set up an SSL certificate, which is nice because then the server supports https.

And... bam! We have a new web server for our project running at https://127.0.0.1:8000. Copy that, spin over to your most favorite browser, paste and... welcome to Symfony 7! That's what I was going to say!

Next, let's sit down, order some Earl Grey tea, and become friends with every file in our new app... which isn't very many.