Set up Pear and Symfony on Dreamhost in 5 minutes.

There were a few glitches to install pear and symfony on Dreamhost before. But recently I found out the way to run (at least) Symfony pretty quick, so I’d like to share with you. I just open a new account, and try this procedure. It will take 5 minutes and 23 seconds. Not bad.

Procedure

1. Append $HOME/bin in your search path

   $ vi .bash_profile
   ...
   PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
   ...
   $ source .bash_profile

2. make a link to php5 binary in your $HOME/bin

   $ ln -s /usr/local/dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi $HOME/bin/php
   $ php -v
   PHP 5.2.6 (cgi-fcgi) (built: May 11 2008 13:09:38)
   Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group...

3. make a local PEAR repository by using go-pear.

   $ wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear
   $ mv go-pear go-pear.php
   $ php go-pear.php
   ...

4. add $HOME/pear/bin in search path

   $ vi .bash_profile
   …
   PATH=$HOME/bin:$HOME/pear/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
   …
   $ source .bash_profile

5. install symfony!

   $ pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
   $ pear install symfony/symfony-1.0.17

That’s it! The original problem: you cannot change php.ini for your own site so that you cannot use Pear library, except you set up a cgi-bin dir and copy php5.cgi in it, which is ugly and hard to maintain. Symfony has its own loaders that will allow make it run without tweaking php.ini!