Symfony - Day 2 - Installing Symfony

I work on a large campus, so I've been carrying around my Nexus 7 reading the Symfony documentation on my 15-20 minute shuttle rides. It's time to build something.

Unfortunately the installation did not go as smoothly as I had hoped. Symfony relies heavily on Composer as a dependency management library. Wanting to get the full experience, I followed Symfony's installation guide as closely as I could. This proved to be more difficult that anticipated even though Composer installed perfectly. On the Symfony install page, I see that I need to run this:

composer create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition my/install/path 2.1.3




Note: I did not use "composer.phar" as the Symfony page indicates since I performed the Composer global install

This produced the following error:

[Composer\Downloader\TransportException]  The "http://nodeload.github.com/symfony/symfony-standard/zipball/v2.1.3" file could not be downloaded (HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found)




After much digging, and a couple of botched manual installations I found a reference to the "--prefer-source" tag. Running the following composer line gave me exactly what I needed:

php composer create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition my/install/path 2.1.3 --prefer-source




Essentially this clones directly from github rather than downloading the zipball. Regardless, I now have a clean copy of Symfony with vendors installed and a git repository already in place.

At this stage, I don't have a need to get into the folder permission or rewriting aspects as I'm working solely on a xampp localhost. I'll cross that bridge when the time comes.