Tag Archive for 'media-temple'

05
Jan

Setting up a Symfony project on Media Temple’s Grid Service, Part 2

By Mark Quezada 0 Comments
Categories: Web Development

In part one of this series, we looked at setting up a basic Subversion repository to house our new Symfony project on Media Temple’s Grid-Service. This article will take that a step further by explaining how to set up your OS X box for local development using said repository. Although this article will start from where we left off last time, there’s really nothing specific to Media Temple about these steps and these same basic principles can be used with any other host.

I think a lot of people don’t really understand the benefits of local development. For those who are unfamiliar, “local development” means simply that your machine acts as both client and server. This means that instead of, say downloading a file from your server, editing it, and uploading it to see changes, you simply edit and save the file right on your machine and see changes reflected instantly. There’s really no magic here, it’s just that we do the hard work up-front to have an apache server running on our local machine so that simply saving a file is saving to the server.

Requirements

Installing and configuring Apache, MySQL and PHP5 are out of the scope of this article, but we’ll be working on the assumption that these are all installed and working. Mac OS X has long shipped with an Apache server built-in, and version 10.5, Leopard, ships with Apache2 and PHP5 pre-installed. The shipping version of those two packages may be all you need, but I’ve been using Marc Liyanage’s PHP5 package with a custom Apache2 install for various reasons (namely, Apple’s PHP5 version is missing some critical libraries like mcrypt and GD). At the time of this writing there is currently no supported version of his PHP package for use with Leopard, but there are various threads on his forum about getting it working. You can also use something like MAMP (along with these setup instructions for Leopard).

Setting Up the Development Environment

We left off on the previous article with a working copy checked out of our Subversion repository into the ~/Sites/ folder. All we need to do now is map the web directory in our Symfony project to an Apache Virtual host so we can serve it up locally.

Find your apache config file and edit it appropriately. I like to have separate config files for each site that I’m working on, so I’ve edited my main config file located at /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf and added the following line at the end of that file:

# Include custom configurations for symfony
Include conf/sites/*

This basically tells the Apache server to look in conf/sites/ for any extra configuration files and load them as well. I’ve then added a config file for each site that I’m working on. For example, in conf/sites/project1.conf we’ll add this:

<VirtualHost project1.dev:80> 
    ServerName project1.dev
    <Directory />
        AllowOverride All
        Allow from All
    </Directory>

    DocumentRoot /Users/mark/Sites/project1/web

    ErrorLog logs/project1.dev-error_log
</VirtualHost>

… which will allow us to access our symfony project. Be sure to substitute your own username in the DocumentRoot directive and restart the apache server so that the changes take effect.

We’ll also have to edit our hosts file so that “project1.dev” is considered a valid hostname for our machine. In /etc/hosts/ add this line:

127.0.0.1 project1.dev

It should be noted that I like to use the “.dev” domain for my dev environment, but this is simply my own convention. I’ve heard of other symfony users using something like “.sf” instead which would work just as well.

You should now be able to pull up http://project1.dev/ from a browser and see the default symfony project page.

Some Added Sugar

At this point we pretty much have a working local copy of our symfony project. It’s running as a subversion working copy which allows us to track and check-in changes, which is great. We are also able to test our site using any browser on our machine be it Safari, Firefox, Camino or anything else that’s native to Mac OS X. The one thing we can’t do is test our site locally using a PC version of Internet Explorer, which still accounts for about 75% of browsers.

One great thing about Apple’s recent switch to Intel processors is the ability to run Windows through virtualization right from within OS X. If you’ve got VMware’s Fusion installed, we can update our setup a bit so that we can check our site from Windows, without needing another physical box.

First, boot up your Windows XP virtual machine and open a command prompt by choosing “Run…” from the Start Menu and typing in “cmd”:

Windows Start Menu

Windows Run Command

Once you’ve got the prompt, type:

ipconfig /all

This will list all of your network adapters. What we’re looking for is the “Default Gateway” entry under the Ethernet adapter heading.

Windows Default Gateway

Copy down that IP address. Now, open your hosts file which is probably located at C:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc/hosts in your favorite editor (notepad works fine).

Windows Hosts File

This is essentially the same file we just edited on OS X, but there will be one major difference. We’re going to put the IP of our host machine as the mapping IP for our development domain like so:

192.168.171.2   project1.dev

Now, you should be able to open a browser on your Windows Virtual Machine and see the same symfony project that we just set up on OS X. The only downside I’ve seen with this is if your Gateway IP changes on the Windows box. You’ll have to update the Windows hosts file to reflect the new IP. I’m sure there’s probably an automated way to do that, but my IP seems to be pretty consistent unless I actually shut-down the Virtual Machine instead of just suspending it.

Next Steps

At this point you can also install and configure your database software. MySQL makes it easy with their OS X installer which even comes with a startup script. As of this writing, there is still no Leopard specific version, but there are instructions elsewhere on loading MySQL or migrating from Tiger.

Once it’s installed, you can add a database that will be for local development and then update your symfony config/databases.yml file with the information:

dev:
  propel:
    class:          sfPropelDatabase
    param:
      dsn:          mysql://user:pass@localhost/project1_db

prod:
  propel:
    class:          sfPropelDatabase
    param:
      dsn:          mysql://user:pass@internal-db.sXXXXX.gridserver.com/project1_db

…where sXXXXX is substituted with your Grid Server account number. You’ll notice that we’ve set up our dev and prod environments to use different databases. The dev environment uses the DSN for the local database you just installed while the prod environment uses a Media Temple specific DSN. This means that when developing locally, we’ll always be calling the dev environment from our browser so that we’re loading the correct database:

http://project1.dev/frontend_dev.php

Conclusion

I hope this provides some insight as to why local web development on an OS X box works so well. You get to edit and save files without the delay of saving to a server and you get to have an all-in-one testing machine that you can use to test sites in different browsers and on different platforms.

15
Dec

Setting up a Symfony project on Media Temple’s Grid Service, Part 1

By Mark Quezada 0 Comments
Categories: Web Development

Media Temple’s Grid-Service is a great, low-cost solution for developing and deploying Symfony applications. This article will walk you through setting up a Grid-Server Subversion repository for use with a Symfony project. The main point here is being able to create and use a symfony project hosted on a Grid Server without having to have symfony pre-installed at all locally.

Setting Up Subversion

Symfony is designed to be used with version management software like Subversion. If you’ve never used versioning software, you should read about the benefits right from the Subversion book itself, but in general, it tends to make life easier for developing and maintaining large code bases as it tracks revisions between files and authors. Subversion is already installed in the Grid-Service environment, so all we have to do is set up a new repository. Media Temple has a knowledge base article describing the basic steps, but we’ll be tailoring things a bit to Symfony.

Be sure that you’ve enabled SSH access on your account. Personally, I like creating the repository using the serveradmin user, and then I’ll make commits using a local user on whichever domain I’ll be using. Let’s get started.

Once you’ve logged in via SSH as serveradmin, move into the data directory. This is where we’ll be creating the repository:

cd data

Then, create the base repository like so (substituting your own repository name for mirthlab):

svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs mirthlab

I tend to use separate repositories for each domain. This allows me to use a structure of the form:

mirthlab/
    project1/
        trunk/
        tags/
        branches/
    project2/
        trunk/
        tags/
        branches/
some_other_domain/
    project3/
        trunk/
        tags/
        branches/

… so I can effectively have as many projects related to each domain in version control as I need.

Now that we’ve created the repository, let’s create the base folder for the Symfony project. While still in the data directory, we’ll create a few new folders:

mkdir project1
mkdir project1/trunk
mkdir project1/tags
mkdir project1/branches

… where project1 is the name of your symfony project. This might all look familiar if you’re read through the Subversion documentation, but we’re going to add a couple of folders:

mkdir project1/trunk/lib
mkdir project1/trunk/lib/vendor

It’ll become clear in a moment why we’re doing this, but the short of it is that we’re going to link the Symfony libraries directly to the project itself using the lib/vendor folder. Once you’re done, commit the contents of your project folder to the repo like so:

svn import project1 file:///home/<site_number>/data/mirthlab/project1 --message "Creating initial repo."

Be sure to change <site_number>, mirthlab and project1 appropriately, so that they match your setup. Please note that this assumes you’re starting with a fresh Symfony project. If there’s an existing project you have that you want to import into the repository, these steps would vary slightly since you wouldn’t have to set up a lib folder.

The folder structure was imported into the repository, so you can safely delete the project folder skeleton we made from the data folder:

rm -rf project1

Set Up Additional SVN Users

This step is optional, but would be helpful if you’re going to allow multiple users to work on this repo. There’s also a Media Temple KB article for this if you’re curious. Log in to your Media Temple Account Center for your domain. Click on the “Email Users” button and add some local users.

Email Users Button

I created a user “mark” for my domain. Also, be sure to check the “Enable SSH access?” checkbox:

image here

Now, in order to allow other users to use the new repo, we have to give group access to the directory. From within the data directory run this command as serveradmin:

chmod -R g+w mirthlab

Again, being sure to substitute your own repository name for mirthlab.

Setting Up Symfony

Now that you have your base folder structure, it’s time to get the Symfony project initialized. Connect to your Subversion repository and download the trunk of our project by running the following commands locally. I’m on a Mac OS X box, so I’ll use the terminal to do a checkout of my project to the ~/Sites folder:

cd ~/Sites
svn checkout svn+ssh://your_user%your_domain.com@your_domain.com/home/<site_number>/data/mirthlab/project1/trunk project1

Note: svn checkout svn+ssh... should all be on one line. This creates a project1 folder in my Sites folder, which is just what I want. Now let’s get our Symfony project structure set up by linking the Symfony libraries to our lib/vendor folder with a subversion externals link.

cd project1
svn propedit svn:externals lib/vendor/

This should bring up your favorite text editor. Simply paste this line into the file, save and close it:

symfony http://svn.symfony-project.com/branches/1.0

This effectively links lib/vendor/symfony to the stable 1.0 branch of Symfony. Only security and bug fixes go into this branch, so there’s no need to worry about it breaking your app when running an svn up. Now, commit your changes back to the repository:

svn commit --message "Linking Symfony libraries to lib/vendor"

And when that’s done, update the local working copy to get the libraries:

svn up

Since we now have a local copy of symfony, we can use the symfony binary to execute pake tasks. Let’s flesh out our project by creating the initial structure using the init-project task.

lib/vendor/symfony/data/bin/symfony init-project project1

… where project1 is the name of our project. This doesn’t necessarily have to match the name of your repository project, but that’s usually what I use. This project name is used to set up defaults in files like propel.ini and properties.ini.

Also, be sure to change the path for the symfony libraries in config/config.php:

$sf_symfony_lib_dir  = dirname(__FILE__).'/../lib/vendor/symfony/lib';
$sf_symfony_data_dir = dirname(__FILE__).'/../lib/vendor/symfony/data';

… this just sets them up to use a relative path, instead of an absolute one (which we’ll need when we push this code to the production server).

We can now add the rest of the project to source control:

svn add *
svn commit --message "Added initial symfony project structure."

Subversion might complain that the lib folder is already under version control, but that’s ok.

Next Steps

Additional general info on Symfony and Subversion can be gleaned from Dave Dash’s excellent article: Tips for Symfony and Subversion. Read and follow the directions in that article to complete your setup by ignoring files in cache and log as well as other auto-generated files like the model files Propel generates.

Conclusion

With this setup, we now have a Symfony project under source control on a Media Temple Grid-Service account. We also now have symfony installed locally and which we can use by calling simply ./symfony from within our project directory. In the next article, we’ll take a look at getting our local development environment set up for editing on a Mac OS X box.