Symfony3 Restructuring

Symfony3 is coming soon and with it a handful of wonderful changes and restructuring to the core directory structure of a symfony app.

The new directory structure has a number of benefits, all of which are minor and may require minimal changes to your workflow.

PHPUnit

phpunit can now be run from the project root without having to explicitly specify the path of the configuration file.

# Symfony2
phpunit -c app/phpunit.xml

# Symfony3 (no need to specify the configuration file location)
phpunit

Binary Executables

All binary executable files are now all located in a single location – the bin directory.

This simplifies things also so on a *NIX machine you can configure your $PATH to simplify calling repeatable commands.

# you can update your `PATH` to include the `bin` directory
PATH="./bin:$PATH"

# From your project root you can now run executables like so:
console
symfony_requirements
doctrine

# else with no `PATH` update
bin/console
bin/symfony_requirements
bin/doctrine

A new /var directory

The new /var directory contains the files to which the system writes data to during the course of its operation; this replaces/moves cache and logs from the app directory.

This also makes it easier to add permissions, the entire /var directory should be writable by your webserver (apache, nginx, etc).

# default symfony3 `var` directory
var/bootstrap.php.cache
var/cache
var/logs

Symfony requirements check

Running symfony_requirements will output mandatory & optional environment configurations.

cd /path/to/my_app
symfony_requirements

Credit

Most of the credit for this post belongs to justAnil @ StackOverflow for his amazing write-up.