Symfony VPS & Dedicated Symfony Servers for Your Web Projects

⚠️Note
Due to Symfony's higher resource usage, we recommend starting with the Basic VPS Plan (8GB RAM, 4 CPU Cores) as the entry-level option for stable performance.

This guide walks you through a production-ready Symfony setup, showing how to install Symfony with Composer, deploy Symfony to a live server, and follow best practices for Composer Symfony management and overall Symfony setup in production environments.

Environment Assumptions

• Ubuntu VPS (22.04)
• SSH access via IP
• Domain pointed to VPS (A record → IP)
• User: root or sudo-enabled user

Connect to Your Server via SSH

Ubuntu default username is:

administrator

To log in using your VPS IP:

ssh administrator@your_vps_ip

• The system will prompt you for the administrator user’s password.
• Enter it and press Enter to log in.

Switch to root (full admin privileges):

sudo -i

Step 1: System Initialization (Production Required)

Update the system packages and install basic tools:

apt update && apt upgrade -y
apt install -y software-properties-common ca-certificates curl unzip git

Set the timezone (important for logs):

timedatectl set-timezone UTC

Step 2: Install Nginx (Web Server)

apt install -y nginx
systemctl enable nginx
systemctl start nginx

Check if Nginx is running:

curl http://127.0.0.1

Step 3: Install PHP (Recommended 8.2)

Add the PHP PPA repository and install PHP 8.2 with necessary extensions for Symfony:

add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php -y
apt update
apt install -y \
php8.2-fpm php8.2-cli php8.2-common php8.2-mysql \
php8.2-xml php8.2-mbstring php8.2-intl \
php8.2-curl php8.2-zip php8.2-opcache

Verify PHP installation:

php -v
systemctl status php8.2-fpm

Step 4: Install Composer (Production Way)

cd /tmp
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer -o composer-setup.php
php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
composer --version

This step prepares you for Composer Symfony management.

Step 5: Create Project Directory & Install Symfony

Create the project directory:

mkdir -p /var/www/yourdomain.com
cd /var/www/yourdomain.com

Use Composer to install Symfony:

composer create-project symfony/skeleton .

For full web applications (Twig, Controller, etc.):

composer require symfony/webapp-pack

Step 6: Directory Permissions

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/yourdomain.com
chmod -R 755 /var/www/yourdomain.com
chmod -R 775 var

Ensure Symfony has write permissions for the var directory.

Step 7: Configure Nginx (Production Core)

Create a new site configuration:

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com

Paste the following production-ready configuration:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;

    root /var/www/yourdomain.com/public;
    index index.php;

    client_max_body_size 32M;

    location / {
        try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root;
        internal;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known) {
        deny all;
    }
}

Enable the site and reload Nginx:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
nginx -t
systemctl reload nginx

Optional: Force HTTP → HTTPS redirection by adding at the top of the server block:

return 301 https://$host$request_uri;

Step 8: Environment Variables

Create .env.local for production:

nano .env.local

Add:

APP_ENV=prod
APP_DEBUG=0
APP_SECRET=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
DATABASE_URL="mysql://user:[email protected]:3306/dbname"

Step 9: Symfony Production Optimization

composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader --no-interaction
php bin/console cache:clear --env=prod
php bin/console cache:warmup
php -i | grep opcache

This ensures your Symfony application is fully optimized for production.

Step 10: Enable HTTPS (Production Required)

apt install -y certbot python3-certbot-nginx
certbot --nginx -d yourdomain.com -d www.yourdomain.com

Final Access

Visit in your browser:

https://yourdomain.com

Your Symfony deployment should be live 🎉

Common Production Mistakes

• ❌ Nginx root pointing to project root → ✅ must point to /public
• ❌ 777 permissions → ✅ www-data + 775
• ❌ Using .env → ✅ use .env.local
• ❌ APP_DEBUG=1 → ✅ APP_DEBUG=0