Install Symfony app in a subfolder of an existing site

!!! Warning: this post is more than 8 years old and was written when using previous versions of Symony, so it may not apply to current versions. Let us know if it does not work for you.

The request was simple: one of my customer wanted to have a Symfony app available as a subfolder of an existing site, i.e.

http://www.example.com/myapp/

Googling for it, I found lots of tutorials but each one of them failed to meet two specific requirements:

• I don’t want to edit the virtual host configuration
• the application folders (“app”, “bin”, “src”, “vendor”) must be outside the site root

So here’s my solution, which only assumes that you have file access (i.e. FTP) at one level above your site root.

Upload the application part

Start by uploading the application folders at the same level of your site root:

[ftproot]
-- public_html
---- ...
---- ...
-- symfonyapp
---- app
---- bin
---- src
---- vendor
---- web
------ app.php
------ app_dev.php
------ ...
---- composer.json
---- composer.lock

Move the web part

Move the content of the “web” folder into the desired subfolder, i.e. “myapp”.

[ftproot]
-- public_html
---- ...
---- ...
---- myapp
------ app.php
------ app_dev.php
------ ...
-- symfonyapp
---- app
---- bin
---- src
---- vendor
---- composer.json
---- composer.lock

Let the web know where is the application

Edit files app.php and app_dev.php and insert the new application location.

require_once __DIR__ . '/../../symfonyapp/app/bootstrap.php.cache';
require_once __DIR__ . '/../../symfonyapp/app/AppKernel.php';

Let the application know how the web folder is called

Edit file composer.json with the new web folder name

{
    ...
    "extra": {
        ...
       "symfony-web-dir": "../public_html/myapp"
    }
}

Bonus: Assetic

As reported in the comments, if you use Assetic, you have to let it know where the assets are:

read_from: “%kernel.root_dir%/../../public_html/myapp”

Conclusions

Basically, we’re used to have the “web” folder inside the Symfony app structure but as you just read it’s very easy to put it elsewhere.

Disclaimer: I haven’t yet tested the full “Rewrite” thing yet, I’ll come back to this later.