So I’ve been playing with Symfony a bit lately, and it’s growing on me. I think I understand most of the “magic,” and am now looking to convince myself that it’s actually safe.

Since the different notes I found through google all have undesirable side effects (IMO), here’s how I did it. My goal was to minimize lasting impact on my system (i.e. I’d like to delete /Applications/MAMP and have everything back to normal, more or less) and minimal deviation from the standard MAMP install.

These notes were taken while setting up symfony 1.0 on MAMP 1.7.

  1. Download and install MAMP.
  2. Create a file called “MAMP terminal.command” with the following content:
  3. Make that file executable.
  4. Double-click it to get a terminal that has the MAMP stuff on the path. This is where I feel many of the other documented installs went wrong. Most had you symlinking MAMP binaries into /usr/bin! The point of MAMP for me is that it’s a self-contained installation for development purposes. I decidedly do not want it to get in my way when I don’t explicitly tell it to.
  5. Make sure your pear directories are all safely under /Applications/MAMP: 
    bash-3.2$ pear config-show
Configuration (channel pear.php.net):
=====================================
Auto-discover new Channels     auto_discover    <not set>
Default Channel                default_channel  pear.php.net
HTTP Proxy Server Address      http_proxy       <not set>
PEAR server [DEPRECATED]       master_server    pear.php.net
Default Channel Mirror         preferred_mirror pear.php.net
Remote Configuration File      remote_config    <not set>
PEAR executables directory     bin_dir          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin
PEAR documentation directory   doc_dir          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/doc
PHP extension directory        ext_dir          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922
PEAR directory                 php_dir          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php
PEAR Installer cache directory cache_dir        /tmp/pear/cache
PEAR data directory            data_dir         /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/data
PEAR Installer download        download_dir     /tmp/pear/cache
directory
PHP CLI/CGI binary             php_bin          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php
php.ini location               php_ini          <not set>
PEAR Installer temp directory  temp_dir         /tmp/pear/temp
PEAR test directory            test_dir         /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/test
Cache TimeToLive               cache_ttl        3600
Preferred Package State        preferred_state  stable
Unix file mask                 umask            22
Debug Log Level                verbose          1
PEAR password (for             password         <not set>
maintainers)
Signature Handling Program     sig_bin          /usr/local/bin/gpg
Signature Key Directory        sig_keydir       /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/pearkeys
Signature Key Id               sig_keyid        <not set>
Package Signature Type         sig_type         gpg
PEAR username (for             username         <not set>
maintainers)
User Configuration File        Filename         /Users/yourusername/.pearrc
System Configuration File      Filename         /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/pear.conf

    Note that you may need to move ~/.pearrc out of the way if you’ve used PEAR outside MAMP on your system in order to get your config to look like this one.

  6. Install symfony: 
    bash-3.2$ peardev channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
bash-3.2$ peardev install symfony/symfony

    Note that if your user owns /Applications/MAMP you do not need to use sudo here.

  7. Add an alias to /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf: 
    Alias /sf /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/data/symfony/web/sf
<Directory "/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/data/symfony/web/sf">
    AllowOverride All
    Allow from All
</Directory>
  8. Set up your symfony project
  9. Set the document root in MAMP (Preferences -> Apache) to /Users/yourusename/mamproot
  10. Symlink /Users/yourusername/mamproot to your symfony project’s web directory.
  11. Stop and start Apache.
  12. Visit http://localhost:8888/ and confirm that you have a nicely decorated symfony welcome page.
    13.