Running Drupal 8.8 with the Symfony Local Server

Installation

https://symfony.com/doc/current/setup/symfony_server.html

The Symfony server is bundled as part of the symfony binary that is available to download from https://symfony.com/download.

To install it, run this command:

curl -sS https://get.symfony.com/cli/installer | bash

Even though it's by Symfony, the local webserver works with any type of project - including Drupal 8 (and 9) and Drupal 7.

Getting started

Here are the basic commands to start and stop the server:

# Alias for server:start, starts the server
symfony serve

# Run the server in daemon mode (in the background)
symfony serve -d

# Display the status of the server
symfony server:status

# Stop the server
symfony server:stop

If your Drupal files are within a web or docroot directory, it will automatically be used as the document root for the server, so files are served from there if you run the serve command.

If you use a different subdirectory name - one that isn't loaded automatically - you can use the --document-root option:

symfony serve --document-root www

Different PHP Versions

One of the most useful features of the Symfony server is that it supports multiple versions of PHP if you have them installed, and a different version can be selected per directory.

This is done by adding a .php-version file to the root of the project that contains the PHP version to use. For example:

echo "7.3" > .php-version

Next time the server is started, this file will be read and the correct version of PHP will be used.

If you're using macOS and want to install another version of PHP, you can do it using Homebrew:

# Install PHP 7.3
brew install php@7.3

Further PHP customisations can be made per project by adding a php.ini file.

Securing Sites Locally

The Symfony server allows for serving sites via HTTPS locally by installing its own local certificate authority.

If it's not installed automatically, run this command to install it:

symfony server:ca:install

Now any site will be served via HTTPS by default, and any HTTP requests will be automatically redirected.

If you need to run a site with just HTTP, add the --no-tls option to the serve command.

Adding Databases (and other services) with Docker

The Symfony server has an integration with Docker for providing extra services - such as databases that we'll need to install Drupal.

This is my docker-compose.yaml file which defines a database service for MySQL:

version: '2.1'

services:
database:
image: mysql:5.7
ports: [3306]
environment:
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: secret
volumes:
- mysql-data:/var/lib/mysql

volumes:
mysql-data:

Because port 3306 is exposed, the server recognises it as a database service and automatically creates environment variables prefixed with DATABASE_.

A list of all the environment variables can be seen by running symfony var:export (add | tr " " "\n" if you want to view each one on a new line, and | sort if you want to list them alphabetically):

DATABASE_DATABASE=main
DATABASE_DRIVER=mysql
DATABASE_HOST=127.0.0.1
DATABASE_NAME=main
DATABASE_PASSWORD=secret
DATABASE_PORT=32776
DATABASE_SERVER=mysql://127.0.0.1:32776
DATABASE_URL=mysql://root:secret@127.0.0.1:32776/main?sslmode=disable&charset=utf8mb4
DATABASE_USER=root
DATABASE_USERNAME=root
SYMFONY_DOCKER_ENV=1
SYMFONY_TUNNEL=
SYMFONY_TUNNEL_ENV=

Now these environment variables can be used within settings.php file to allow configure Drupal's database connection settings:

// web/sites/default/settings.php

if ($_SERVER['SYMFONY_DEFAULT_ROUTE_URL']) {
$databases['default']['default'] = [
'driver' => $_SERVER['DATABASE_DRIVER'],
'host' => $_SERVER['DATABASE_HOST'],
'database' => $_SERVER['DATABASE_NAME'],
'username' => $_SERVER['DATABASE_USER'],
'password' => $_SERVER['DATABASE_PASSWORD'],
'port' => $_SERVER['DATABASE_PORT'],
'prefix' => '',
'namespace' => 'Drupal\\Core\\Database\\Driver\\mysql',
'collation' => 'utf8mb4_general_ci',
];
}

To keep things organised, I usually like to split these settings into their own file and include it:

if ($_SERVER['SYMFONY_DEFAULT_ROUTE_URL'] && file_exists(__DIR__ . '/settings.symfony.php')) {
require_once __DIR__ . '/settings.symfony.php';
}

Installing Drupal

Now that Drupal can connect to the (empty) database, we can install the site. I usually do this using Drush, which is added as a dependency via Composer.

The command that I'd usually run is:

cd web

../vendor/bin/drush site-install

However, this will cause an error like this because Drupal cannot connect to the database when Drush is run in this way.

Error: Class 'Drush\Sql\Sql' not found in Drush\Sql\SqlBase::getInstance()

To fix this, ensure that the command is prefixed with symfony php. This will ensure that the correct PHP version and configuration is used, and that the appropriate environment variables are available.

symfony php ../vendor/bin/drush site-install

This also applies to all other Drush commands.

Custom Domain Names

Currently we can only access the site via the localhost URL with a specific port. The port is determined automatically when the server is started so it can change if you have multiple projects running.

Symfony server also allows for adding local domain names through a proxy. This is useful if you always want to access the site from the same URL, or if the site relies on using a specific URL such as a multisite setup (multiple domains served from the same codebase).

The proxy overview screen

Setting up a multisite

Here's an example of how I would use local domains to configure a multisite Drupal installation (taken from https://github.com/opdavies/symfony-server-drupal-test).

The first thing is to add the subdomain to the proxy. In this example, I'm going to set up a version of the Umami demo installation profile at https://umami.wip.

# Add umami.wip to the proxy and attach it to this directory
symfony proxy:domain:attach umami

Now we can add it to Drupal's sites.php file to route requests to the correct site directory:

// web/sites/sites.php

// This maps https://umami.wip to the sites/umami directory
$sites['umami.wip'] = 'umami';

To create the directory, we can duplicate the default site directory and its contents.

cp -R web/sites/default web/sites/umami

To create a separate database, we add a new service to the docker-compose.yaml file and a new MySQL volume to store the data. We can use labels to generate site specific environment variables.

version: '2.1'

services:
database:
image: mysql:5.7
ports: [3306]
environment:
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: secret
volumes:
- mysql-data:/var/lib/mysql

+ database_umami:
+ image: mysql:5.7
+ ports: [3306]
+ environment:
+ MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: secret
+ volumes:
+ - mysql-data-umami:/var/lib/mysql
+ labels:
+ com.symfony.server.service-prefix: 'UMAMI_DATABASE'

volumes:
mysql-data:
+ mysql-data-umami:

These can then be added to sites/umami/settings.php:

$databases['default']['default'] = [
'driver' => $_SERVER['UMAMI_DATABASE_DRIVER'],
'host' => $_SERVER['UMAMI_DATABASE_HOST'],
'database' => $_SERVER['UMAMI_DATABASE_NAME'],
'username' => $_SERVER['UMAMI_DATABASE_USER'],
'password' => $_SERVER['UMAMI_DATABASE_PASSWORD'],
'port' => $_SERVER['UMAMI_DATABASE_PORT'],
'prefix' => '',
'namespace' => 'Drupal\\Core\\Database\\Driver\\mysql',
'collation' => 'utf8mb4_general_ci',
];

Now that the Umami site is able to connect to its own database, we can install Drupal - specifying the installation profile to use and also the site directory to target.

symfony php ../vendor/bin/drush site-install \
demo_umami \
-l umami \
--no-interaction