Hacking Symfony Application in A Shared Hosting

In a shared hosting environment, you may not have a full access to the server. Everything has already been installed. But a least they provide a secure shell (SSH).

I have successfully deploy a syfmony 1.2 application in a shared hosting, surely with a hacking.

PDO Hack

Symfony 1.2 at least need PHP 5.2.4 and above. So if your PHP version is 5.2.0 and you're using MySQL database, make sure to activate PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY for buffered MYSQL Api.

Edit your databases.yml:

dev:
  propel:
    param:
      classname:  DebugPDO

all:
  propel:
    class:        sfPropelDatabase
    param:
      dsn:        mysql:dbname=your_db;host=localhost
      username:   root
      password:   your_password
      encoding:   utf8
      persistent: true
      pooling:    true
      classname:  PropelPDO
      options:
        MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY:  {value: on}

Symfony CLI Hack

Usually, we can customize the php.ini file for web server, but not for the PHP CLI. Unfortunately, the PDO extension for PHP CLI is not enabled by default. As in shared hosting environment, there are no write access to system configuration.

Try this:

$ php -i | grep PDO

If you got an output telling about PDO extensions has been enabled then, you don't need this hack.

First, we can create our own php.ini file to be passed to the PHP CLI, and put in a writable directory, for example in the home directory:

# ~/php.ini
extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so
memory_limit=64M

Wrap the symfony command to make sure PHP CLI is using our custom php.ini, create the script and name it symfony.sh. Put in home directory for ease the access:

# ~/symfony.sh
cd /path/to/myproject
php -c ~/php.ini -f symfony -- $*

Make sure the script is executable:

$ chmod u+x ~/symfony.sh

Now you can launch the symfony CLI from within your home directory by issuing:

$ ./symfony.sh [command]