Symfony-Zone

The last week I coded a webbased application thats being used directly from CD-ROM. I used Server2Go as a CD-ROM Webserver that servers the application for browsing and searching on the CD-ROM.As you know my favorite Webframework is Symfony (www.symfony-project.com) so i developed this piece of software with the most current stable symfony version (1.0.9).

There are only some things that needs your attention if you want to make a symfony application runnable from CD-ROM:

1.) Freeze it: After developing you have to freeze your project with:symfony freeze app-name

2.) Now copy the entire (freezed) project folder to the htdocs folder of your Server2Go directory

3.) Clear the cache folder! You can do this by manually delete the content of this folder or by using “symfony cc” before copying the data to the htdocs folder

4.) Open the server/config_tpl/httpd.conf file and change the root directory of the server to the web folder in htdocs:

DocumentRoot “%CDPMS:DOCROOT%/web”

<Directory “%CDPMS:DOCROOT%/web”>

…

</Directory>

So far so good. Now the tricky part begins. Symfony is caching a lot of files and data in order to provide the best possible performance. Therefor views, configfiles and so on will be cached. Where’s the problem? The problem ist that the cache folder on CD-ROM isn’t writable and symfony is throwing exceptions if it can’t write the cache data…

My first thought: No problem, you have just to deactivate the caching in the settings.yml via

cache: off

Works great for view data, but not for the cached config data. Symfony always caches the config, there is no way to deactivate this (or i didn’t find one). So what to do? Was symfony the wrong choice for a cd-rom webapplication? No of course not

There possibility to customize the project structure (foldernames and hierarchie) via the constants.php file. You will find this in the htdocs/data/symfony/config folder. Open it and look for the line that starts with ’sf_cache_dir’ and change it to:

’sf_cache_dir’ => $sf_cache_dir = $_ENV[’S2G_TEMP_FOLDER’].DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR. “cache”. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR. $sf_environment,

Thats it! This line redirects the cache folder to a temorary folder on the users machine (is done by the S2G_TEMP_FOLDER environment variable that is set by Server2Go.

After that you can burn the Server2Go folder to a CD-ROM and everything works as expected

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