Symfony 2 Checklist for Development and Deployment

In my [Building a Personal Web App Head To Toe With Symfony 2](http://www.sitepoint.com/series/building-a-personal-web-app-head-to-toe-with-symfony-2/) series published on Sitepoint, I have covered some basics in bootstrapping, development and finalizing (on some advanced techniques) to use Symfony 2 to develop a web application. However, due to the length limitation of the series, we have not covered much on the "final" step: To deploy a Symfony 2 application to the production environment. When we do development, most likely we are in a "root" role; but in a production environment, we may be deprived of this privilege. Also, the settings may be different. To make things worse, sometimes we are not able to change these settings as we do in our own machines. Thus, it is of great importance to check the "compatibility" of our production server BEFORE any real development is done in our own server. This will avoid such horrible situations like: a library that Symfony depends on is missing, some global settings which the app relies on are unchangeable, etc. Testing the "compatibility" of our production server should really be something we do at the very beginning. There are also some other aspects to be addressed during deployment - such as templates for various error messages, etc. In the following sections, we'll be assuming you don't have full control over your production server. If you do, most of the compatibility issues probably don't apply, as you should be able to resolve them yourself quite easily. ###An empty Symfony framework on the production server Please follow the instructions in [my first article on Symfony 2](http://www.sitepoint.com/building-a-web-app-with-symfony-2-bootstrapping/) to set up an empty Symfony framework on the production server. This is also useful to test if the server has cURL enabled, not only installed on the server but also as a PHP extension, making sure we can grab external resources. In my particular case, this is very important - composer.org is blocked in my country and I need to use a proxy to fetch and install the Symfony Framework. This empty framework can later be checked into version control.

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