After having tried several different ways of installing/setting up Symfony projects, I have settled for what is more or less the official “best practice”, as suggested by the makers of Symfony. For the purpose of clarity, I will use the example c:\demosite in the following explanation. The example is based on an installation on Windows XP, but can be adapted to suit OSX.

1. Create the project folder c:\demosite
2. Create the subfolder(s) c:\demosite\lib\vendor
3. In the vendor folder, do a SVN checkout http://svn.symfony-project.com/branches/1.2/ => c:\demosite\lib\vendor\symfony. You should now have a single symfony folder in your vendor folder
4. From the project root c:\demosite, run the following command: lib\vendor\symfony\data\bin\symfony generate:project demosite. You may or may not have to prefix this command with php, depending on your setup.
5. From now on, you can use the command short cut symfony from the project’s root folder.

TIP#1:

Copy the file c:\demosite\lib\vendor\symfony\data\bin\symfony.bat to the project’s root folder, and rename it sf.bat. You now have an even shorter command sf at your disposal. Test it by typing sf -V.

TIP#2:

Change the following in the project’s configuration class:

//c:\demosite\config\ProjectConfiguration.class.php
require_once dirname(__FILE__).'/../lib/vendor/symfony/lib/autoload/sfCoreAutoload.class.php';

TIP#3

If you use SVN to maintain your project, you can use svn:externals to embed the Symfony library in your lib\vendor folder, thus benefiting from the updates to this particular branch.

For more information, visit the official Symfony site

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