In case you never heard about Symfony, it is a PHP framework to create websites and web applications.
\nIt comes with over 50 reusable components that power many well-known PHP applications, such as Drupal, phpBB, and eZ Publish.
\nThe Symfony release cycle is pretty predictable and follows a time-based model. Major versions come out every two years, while minor versions every six months. At the time of writing, the latest stable release is Symfony 5.
\nHowever, having a good framework is not enough, you still need to host your project somewhere. Symfony encourages using SymfonyCloud, which is their Platform-as-a-Service offer. This may save you some headaches, but at the same time, you may lose control of your infrastructure.
\nIn this blog post, I would like to walk you through another approach, where we will deploy our Symfony 5 application onto the servers of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider of our choice.
\nThere are plenty of them, such as AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine, or Digital Ocean. They all have a strong market position and offer a wide spectrum of services. I've built a few projects based on their infra, but this time I wanted to try out something else.
\nI was looking for a smaller IaaS company that was established somewhere in Europe. Plus, I wanted to spin off the latest Ubuntu LTS server in a Data Center located in Europe. To my surprise, I've found an emerging IaaS player from Spain, which met all those requirements.
\nTo give you a brief summary, Clouding.io provides cloud VPS servers based on Intel Xeon cores, 80 Gbps Cisco network and KVM OpenStack virtualization system. Their offer looks stable enough to me and includes 3x Replica, Tier 4 Datacenter quality level, and Anti-DDOS protection.
\nAdditionally, I could tinker with their platform at no cost, because they give out a 5 EUR credit for free to everyone upon registration.
\nIf you want to follow along, here is the list of requirements:
\nMoreover, the following things are nice to have:
\nWithout further ado, let's start with the technical part of this tutorial.
\nFeel free to skip this part if you use another IaaS platform.
\nAfter signing up for the Clouding account, you can log into their panel with your credentials. Click on the Servers navigation item and then select My Servers tab, which should redirect you to the Servers List page.
\nPress the \"Click here to create your first server\" or \"Plus\" button to start the Creation Wizard screen. In there,
\nIf you prefer visual, here is the aforementioned configuration in the form of an image.
\nOnce ready, please press the Submit button at the bottom of the page. This will start the process of creating a new VPS and you will be redirected back to the Servers List page, as shown below.
\nAt this point, we have all the needed details to SSH into newly created VPS. To do so, open the terminal on your host machine and type the following. (If you use Windows, you may need to install PuTTY first, a free SSH client)
\nssh root@46.183.113.213Replace 46.183.113.213 with the IP of your VPS. As you see, I'm using my VPS root password here, but I strongly encourage you to utilize your SSH keys.
\nIf you see something of that kind,
\nThe authenticity of host '46.183.113.213 (46.183.113.213)' can't be established.\nECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:DUl2RM1UUohS569dJEG/F9/Eco+fkU3VB/9Pg8/JGYA.\nAre you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?please choose yes and you will never be prompted for this again on this computer. After that, use your VPS root password and you should be in your VPS console. To verify if you have the right Ubuntu system, type the following
\nlsb_release -a\n\n# result\nNo LSB modules are available.\nDistributor ID: Ubuntu\nDescription: Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS\nRelease: 18.04\nCodename: bionicThe final steps are to update the Ubuntu list of package sources with command
\napt updateand then upgrade all installed packaged to their newest versions by running
\napt upgrade -yThis can take up to a few minutes and you may be prompted to give an answer during some installation steps.
\nIn case you also see
\nConfiguration file '/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg'\n ==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.\n ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.\n What would you like to do about it ? Your options are:\n Y or I : install the package maintainer's version\n N or O : keep your currently-installed version\n D : show the differences between the versions\n Z : start a shell to examine the situation\n The default action is to keep your current version.\n*** cloud.cfg (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?Hit Enter, choosing the default option to keep your currently-installed version.
\nAfter all of that, let's quickly recap what we have until now and then move on to the next step.
\nLike every Linux system, Ubuntu 18.04 comes with some preinstalled libraries. In the case of PHP, it comes with php7.2 package and we can check it easily by running
\napt show php\n\n# result\nPackage: php\nVersion: 1:7.2+60ubuntu1\nOrigin: Ubuntu\nDepends: php7.2\n...\nAPT-Sources: http://ubuntu.repos.clouding.io bionic/main amd64 Packages\nDescription:\n...\nThis package is a dependency package, which depends on Ubuntu's default\nPHP version (currently 7.2).With that, we can drill down to get more information about the dependant php7.2 package.
\napt show php7.2 -a\n\n# result\nPackage: php7.2\nOrigin: Ubuntu\nVersion: 7.2.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.3\n...\n\nPackage: php7.2\nOrigin: Ubuntu\nVersion: 7.2.3-1ubuntu1\n...As we see, there are actually two available versions of php7.2 package. We can compare them with the Symfony technical requirements and may conclude we are good to go since the minimum required PHP version is 7.2.5.
\nI will choose another route though. We all like the newest language features, so let's install the latest stable PHP package. If you explore the PHP Changelog, PHP 7.4.0 has been released in November 2019. At the time of writing, the latest version is 7.4.2, so let's try to get this one.
\nTo achieve it, we will use deb repositories kindly provided by Sury.org. For Ubuntu, they maintain the PHP Ubuntu Personal Package Archives, which we will install on our VPS.
\napt install software-properties-common -y\nadd-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php -y\napt updateOnce apt finishes updating the package list, we can check again our php package with apt show php -a
It should have two versions now, one coming from Sury and one from Ubuntu.
\nIf we examine the php7.4 package with the command apt show php7.4, we see that version 7.4.2 is available. Let's proceed with the installation.
apt install php7.4It will ask if we want to install the recommended packages. Since php7.4 depends on libapache2-mod-php7.4, which in turn recommends apache2 package, then we will have PHP and Apache with mod_php up and running.
\nAs a side note, you could actually install any other PHP version greater or equal to 7.0.
\nAfter that, we must install a few additional PHP libraries, because both Composer and Symfony need them.
\napt install php7.4-xml php7.4-zip -yAt this point, we can check which versions of PHP and Apache were installed on our VPS with:
\nphp -v\n\n# result\nPHP 7.4.2 (cli) (built: Feb 5 2020 16:50:38) ( NTS )\nCopyright (c) The PHP Group\nZend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies\n with Zend OPcache v7.4.2, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologiesapache2 -v\n\n# result\nServer version: Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu)\nServer built: 2019-09-16T12:58:48As a matter of fact, if you visit your Public IP address now, you should see a default Apache2 page. We will change it after we install the Symfony application. But for now, let's install a Composer package manager, by following its official guide.
\nphp -r \"copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');\"\nphp composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer\n\n# You can also verify the SHA-384 and remove the installer, as described in the guideThis was the last step of this chapter, so let's review what we have achieved so far
\nIt looks like we have all prerequisites to boot up the first Symfony 5 applications, so let's get into the last two chapters together.
\nSymfony Setup Guide recommends two ways of creating a new application:
\nIt also provides two types of Symfony applications
\nIn this tutorial, I will use the Composer to scaffold a traditional web application
\ncd /var/www/\ncomposer create-project symfony/website-skeleton symfony5app\ncd symfony5app\n\n# this will output Symfony version and other information\n./bin/console aboutLet's also scaffold a Symfony Controller to see how various routes are working together.
\n/bin/console make:controller TestControllerHaving all of that, let's configure the Apache2 webserver to run our Symfony 5 application.
\nSymfony Web Server Guide presents a plethora of ways to configure the Symfony applications on the Web Server. In this tutorial, I will choose the easiest route and set up Apache2 with mod_php.
\ncd /etc/apache2/sites-available/\n\ncat > 001-symfony5app.conf <<EOF\n<VirtualHost *:80>\n ServerName symfony5app\n\n DocumentRoot /var/www/symfony5app/public\n DirectoryIndex /index.php\n\n <Directory /var/www/symfony5app/public>\n AllowOverride None\n Require all granted\n\n FallbackResource /index.php\n </Directory>\n\n <Directory /var/www/symfony5app/public/bundles>\n FallbackResource disabled\n </Directory>\n\n ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/symfony5app_error.log\n CustomLog /var/log/apache2/symfony5app_access.log combined\n</VirtualHost>\nEOFHaving that, we must disable the default site configuration and enable ours.
\na2dissite 000-default.conf\na2ensite 001-symfony5app.confAnd lastly, reload the Apache2 webserver to put our changes into action.
\nsystemctl reload apache2If you visit your Public IP now, you should see the Symfony 5 welcome page, as shown below.
\nAnd if you open the /test URL, you should see the scaffolded Test Controller in action.
\nAs a side note, you've probably noticed that the Web Debug Toolbar is visible on both screenshots. If you deploy Symfony application to production, you should follow specific guidelines to make it secure and performant. This tutorial was not meant for that, but if this interests you, I can write another blog post soon.
\nWe have achieved a lot together. We started with spinning off Ubuntu 18.04 VPS on the Clouding platform. Then we SSH into our VPS and installed the latest PHP 7.4 and Apache 2.4 libraries. After that, we took care of Composer package manager. And in the end, we scaffolded the most basic Symfony 5 application and saw it running in the browser.
\nHowever, this only touched the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of options and solutions out there, basically at every step of this process. We didn't discuss here the best practices for deployment, security, or server provisioning. We didn't do anything related to Infrastructure-as-a-Code or dwelt into containerized solutions.
\nI hope I've helped you broaden your understanding of server provisioning and whet your appetite for more complex configuration. I tried to include several links to good practices and industry standards, where you can explore more on your own.
\nI'm considering to write more tutorials covering the following topics, so please let me know if any of them interests you.
\nCover Photo by Alex Machado
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