How to Deploy a Symfony PHP Application on a VPS

What Is Symfony?

Symfony is a robust PHP framework for building web applications and APIs. It provides reusable components, a powerful dependency injection container, and tools like Doctrine ORM. Deploying Symfony on your Breeze gives you a professional PHP application platform.

Prerequisites

• A Breeze running Ubuntu 22.04 or later
• PHP 8.2+ with required extensions
• Composer installed
• Nginx and MySQL/MariaDB installed

Step 1: Install PHP Extensions

sudo apt install php8.2-fpm php8.2-mysql php8.2-xml php8.2-mbstring php8.2-intl php8.2-curl php8.2-zip

Step 2: Deploy the Application

cd /var/www/symfony-app
composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
php bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate --no-interaction
php bin/console cache:clear --env=prod

Step 3: Set Permissions

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data var/
sudo chmod -R 775 var/

Step 4: Configure Nginx

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourdomain.com;
    root /var/www/symfony-app/public;

    location / {
        try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
    }

    location ~ ^/index\.php(/|$) {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $realpath_root;
        internal;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ { return 404; }
}

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/symfony /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx

Step 5: Environment Configuration

Create a .env.local file with your production database URL and app secret. Enable SSL with sudo certbot --nginx -d yourdomain.com.