Deploying to SymfonyCloud

Transition point! Everything we've talked about so far has included profiling our local version of the site. But things get even cooler when we start to profile our production site. Having real data often shows performance problems that you just can't anticipate locally. And because of the way that Blackfire works, we can create profiles on production without slowing down our servers and affecting real users. Plus, once we're profiling on production, we can unlock even more Blackfire features.

So... let's get this thing deployed! You can use any hosting system you want, but I'm going to deploy with SymfonyCloud: it's what we use for SymfonyCasts and it makes deployment dead-simple for Symfony apps. It also has a free trial if you want to code along with me.

Initializing your SymfonyCloud Project

Find your terminal and make sure you're on your master branch. That's not required, but will make life easier. Start by running:

symfony project:init

This will create a few config files that tell SymfonyCloud everything it needs to know to deploy our site. The most important file is .symfony.cloud.yaml:

Ah, this says we want PHP 7.1. Let's upgrade by changing that to 7.3:

Back at the terminal, copy the big git command: this will add all the new files to git and commit them:

git add .symfony.cloud.yaml .symfony/services.yaml .symfony/routes.yaml php.ini
git commit -m "Add SymfonyCloud configuration"

Next, to tell SymfonyCloud that we want a new "server" on their system, run:

symfony project:create

Every "site" in SymfonyCloud is known as a "project" and we only need to run this command once per app. You can ignore the big yellow warning - that's because I have a few other SymfonyCloud projects attached on my account. Let's call the project "Sasquatch Sightings" - that's just a name to help us identify it - and choose the "Development" plan.

The development plan includes a free 7 day trial... which is awesome. You do need to enter your credit card info - that's a way to prevent spammers from creating free trials - but it won't be charged unless you run symfony project:billing:accept later to keep this project permanently.

I already have a credit card on file, so I'll use that one. Once we confirm, this provisions our project in the background... I assume it's waking up thousands of friendly robots who are carefully creating our new space in... the "cloud". Hey! There's one now... dancing!

And... done!

Deploying & Security Checks

Ready for our first deploy? Just type:

symfony app:prepare:deploy --branch=master --confirm --this-is-not-a-real-command

Kidding! Just run:

symfony deploy

And... hello error! This is actually great. Really! The deploy command automatically checks your composer.lock file to see if you're using any dependencies with known security vulnerabilities. Some of my Symfony packages do have vulnerabilities... and if this were a real app, I would upgrade those to fix that problem. But... because this is a tutorial... I'm going to ignore this.

Our First Deploy

Run the command again with a --bypass-checks flag:

symfony deploy --bypass-checks

We still see the big message... but it's deploying! This takes care of many things automatically, like running composer install and executing database migrations. This first deploy will be slow - especially to download all the Composer dependencies. I'll fast-forward. It also handles setting up Webpack Encore... and even creates a shiny new SSL certificate. Those are busy robots!

And... done! It dumped out a funny-looking URL. Copy that. In a real project, you will attach your real domain to SymfonyCloud. But this "fake" domain will work beautifully for us.

Spin back over and pop that URL into your browser to see... a beautiful 500 error! Wah, wah. Actually, we're super close to this all working. Next, let's use a special command to debug this error, add a database to SymfonyCloud - yep, that's the piece we're missing - and load some dummy data over a "tunnel". Lots of good, nerdiness!