Symfony Built-in Web Server on an external environment - php

Question

I configured a web service locally using FOSRestBundle, and it's working perfectly. The only thing i need to write to start my service is
php bin/console server:run xxx.xxx.x.xx:port
and it's all set.
But then i was reading some documentation about the symfony web server, and this information is confusing me:
The built-in web server is meant to be run in a controlled
environment. It is not designed to be used on public networks.
How i'm suppose to use this in my cloud environment? If i want to make this public, how should i start my REST service without using this built-in server?
What is equivalent to the "server:run" command? If i just put the code there, it will not work. I need to start the server for my REST API.

Answer 1

The equivaluent of the server:run command in a production environment is a bit more involved. The web server on a public facing machine has more responsibility than a local development server, and so it needs a bit more configuration.
For production (or even staging) purposes, use a production-ready web server like Apache or Nginx.
I'll share a default setup for apache, on a Debian-based (Ubuntu) system here, and detail a few common pitfalls to avoid.
Install LAMP components
ssh into your machine, and run this command to make sure that apache, php, mysql, etc, are all installed!
First, get the most recent data from the repositories:
sudo apt-get update
The LAMP components that you'll need to run symfony on:
sudo apt-get install apache2 mysql-server libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt
Be sure to store down the root MySQL pass if it asks you for one. (in the event you didn't have it installed, yet.)
Configure MySQL
sudo mysql_install_db to initialize MySQL's system/help tables, etc.
sudo /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation to drop test tables, reload privilege tables.
Jump into the MySQL shell and create a user & db for your app.
mysql -u root -p, and supply your root pw when prompted.
mysql> CREATE USER 'otuyh'#'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; will create your otuyh user with the password password.
mysql> CREATE DATABASE otuyh_app; will create the database your app needs to run on.
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON otuyh_app.* TO 'otuyh'#'localhost';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Configure Apache (the production version of server:run)
Clone or upload your project to /var/www/html.
Edit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf and change the line:
DocumentRoot /var/www/html to DocumentRoot /var/www/html/web
This tells apache which directory to serve requests from the web folder of your app.
Also, alter the line ServerName white-macbook to ServerName example.com where example.com is the domain name pointed at your server.
Finally, add an AllowOverride All line in there, too, to explicitly state that your .htaccess file can also add directives for the web server.
Drop an .htaccess file in your web/ folder that looks something like this:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# Explicitly disable rewriting for front controllers
RewriteRule ^app_dev.php - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
# Change below before deploying to production
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ app_dev.php [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
Alter app_dev to just app, when you're ready to change the environment to production.
Make sure you restart the apache2 service after having altered it's config: sudo service restart apache2.
Run your regular sf2 schema creation, composer install, etc.
And then, make sure that the apache user that serves the files up indeed has access to them!
Additionally, after running composer * or cache:clear as a user other than the one serving files, write permissions can get mixed up, and www-data will need this privilege to write logs, and get cached files. A quick solution:
chown -R your-unix-user:www-data ./app
find ./app/cache -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
find ./app/logs; -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
find ./app/cache -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \
find ./app/logs -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \

Answer 2

Like mentioned the built in Webserver is for Development only.
It is slow and open to all kinds of attacks.
You can run your Service like any other application with a Webserver.
There is a guide on the Symfony site that shows you how to do that.
http://symfony.com/doc/current/deployment.html
Or if you have root access to your cloud server you can configure your Webserver
https://symfony.com/doc/current/setup/web_server_configuration.html