Installing Symfony on a shared host at 1and1 with PEAR

These are the steps that I took and I think that it went rather well. Your mileage may vary.

Prerequisite

1. You have ssh access to the server.
2. http://www.symfony-project.com/content/book/page/installation.html

Configuring PEAR

1. SSH to your host
2. Create a local configuration file for PEAR in your home directory

   pear config-create $HOME .pearrc
   

Change the rights of the file to avoid any http access

chmod 600 .pearrc

3. Create the PEAR directory structure in your home directory

   pear install -o PEAR
   

4. 1and1 defaults to using php4 instead of php5. Need to do a couple of things to get php5 to be the default.

   pear config-set php_bin /usr/local/bin/php5
   export PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN=/usr/local/bin/php5
   

5. Create a bin directory in your home directory if it does not already exist. Create a link to php5 from php in your new bin directory.

   mkdir ~/bin
   cd ~/bin
   ln -s /usr/local/bin/php5 php
   

6. Modify your current PATH to include your new bin and pear directories

   export PATH=~/bin/:~/pear/:$PATH
   

Installing Symfony

1. Add the symfony channel to PEAR

pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com

2. Install Symfony

pear install symfony/symfony

Post Install

1. Add the following lines to your ~/.bash_profile so that the environment is setup when you login

export PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN=/usr/local/bin/php5
export PATH=~/bin/:~/pear/:$PATH

Change the rights of the file to avoid any http access (if new)

chmod 600 .bash_profile

2. Once you have created your first project, you will need to create a link to the sf directory like this

ln -s ~/pear/data/symfony/web/sf ~/my_project_name/web/sf

3. You need to add the following to your project_name/web/.htaccess file:

# Force the use of PHP5
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

4. Uncomment the following line in the same file:

# uncomment the following line, if you are having trouble
# getting no_script_name to work
RewriteBase /

5. Do not forget to fill ~/my_project_name/config/config.php with correct values. The symfony lib files are in ~/pear/php/symfony and the symfony data files are in ~/pear/data/symfony

Troubleshooting

You may have routing problems with applications with no_script_name set to off (backend.php for instance). 1and1 servers do not set SCRIPT_NAME with the correct value (which should be the script name), and add the routing parameters to SCRIPT_NAME. So a request like "http://domain.com/test.php/tralala will set SCRIPT_NAME to "test.php/tralala" instead of "test.php"

Here is one solution, which is not really proper, but it works :

1. Backup sfWebRequest.class.php, edit it, and find the line with SCRIPT_NAME :

cd ~/pear/php/symfony/request
cp sfWebRequest.class.php sfWebRequest.class.php.backup
vim sfWebRequest.class.php
/SCRIPT_NAME

2. Change :

return isset($pathArray['SCRIPT_NAME']) ? $pathArray['SCRIPT_NAME'] : (isset($pathArray['ORIG_SCRIPT_NAME']) ? $pathArray['ORIG_SCRIPT_NAME'] : '');

To :

return isset($pathArray['ORIG_SCRIPT_NAME']) ? $pathArray['ORIG_SCRIPT_NAME'] : (isset($pathArray['SCRIPT_NAME']) ? $pathArray['SCRIPT_NAME'] : '');