Improve Symfony3 cache/logs performance by environment

Tired of the permission errors with your cache/logs in a Vagrant environment? Me too!

After being mildly annoyed with having to manually delete /var/cache and /var/logs repeatedly during “local” development, I decided to brut force matters into my own hands and solve this little annoyance once and for all. Ironically, Symfony 3.3 is addressing some of this, so it may be obsolete by then, but in the meantime…

What are we doing here?

1. Define cache and logs directories for a specific environment.
   1. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could customize these as parameters in the FrameworkBundle? Yes, yes it would!
2. Write a simple CacheCommand that overrides the default cache:clear
3. PARTY!!!!

Customize your getCacheDir and getLogDir methods by your environment

In my case, I typically use Vagrant/Virtualbox for local development, and Docker containers/bitbucket-pipelines for “test” while Production is a variety/flavor of AWS EC2 instances which have some additional flare.

//app/AppKernel.php

public function getCacheDir()
{
    if (in_array($this->environment, array('dev', 'test'))) {
        return '/dev/shm/litwicki/cache/' .  $this->environment;
    }

    return parent::getCacheDir();
}

public function getLogDir()
{
    if (in_array($this->environment, array('dev', 'test'))) {
        return '/dev/shm/litwicki/logs';
    }

    return parent::getLogDir();
}

Write a CacheCommand you can love and cherish forever and ever

<?php namespace Litwicki\AppBundle\Command;

use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputArgument;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputOption;

use Symfony\Component\Filesystem\Filesystem;
use Symfony\Component\Process\Process;
use Symfony\Component\Process\Exception\ProcessFailedException;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Command\ContainerAwareCommand;

class ClearCacheCommand extends ContainerAwareCommand
{
    protected $interval = 5;
    /**
     * @var array
     */
    protected $config = array();

    /**
     * @var array
     */
    protected $connections = array();

    protected function configure()
    {
        $this->setName('cache:clear')
             ->setDescription('Clear the application cache and reset permissions.')
        ;
    }

    public function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)
    {

        $root = '/dev/shm/litwicki';
        $cache = sprintf('%s/cache', $root);
        $logs = sprintf('%s/logs', $root);

        /**
         * Remove the entire cache/logs directory
         */
        $process = new Process(sprintf('sudo rm -rf %s', $root));
        $process->run();

        // executes after the command finishes
        if (!$process->isSuccessful()) {
            throw new ProcessFailedException($process);
        }

        /**
         * Recreate the cache/logs home dir
         */
        $process = new Process(sprintf('sudo mkdir %s', $root));
        $process->run();

        // executes after the command finishes
        if (!$process->isSuccessful()) {
            throw new ProcessFailedException($process);
        }

        /**
         * Reset permissions on cache/logs home
         */
        $process = new Process(sprintf('sudo chmod -R 0777 %s', $root));
        $process->run();

        // executes after the command finishes
        if (!$process->isSuccessful()) {
            throw new ProcessFailedException($process);
        }

        $output->writeln('');
        $output->writeln('<info> LITWICKI: cache / logs rebuid complete</info>');
        $output->writeln('');

    }

    protected function waitInterval()
    {
        sleep($this->interval);
    }
}

PARTY!!!

Now you can enjoy life and all references to cache:clear will run your new and improved command that will also work noticably faster in Vagrant development environments; thanks entirely to Benjamin Eberlei and his wonderful blog post.

Enjoy!

cd /path/to/myapp && php bin/console cache:clear