Vagrant and symfony2

Question

I'm having kind of a bizzare issue related to installing Symfony2 from within a vagrant environment. The environment is set up correctly and is running a web server that is serving files from a folder that is shared with the vagrant environment that is located in the base directory of vagrant.

Basically, vagrant is initiated in directory foo and then within foo, there is a directory called webroot. Vagrant automagically shares the foo directory. An apache server is set up to run so that webroot is the base http directory. This all works fine and I am able to serve basic HTML, PHP and the MySQL connection is tested to be fine.

I used composer to install vagrant the recommended way, into directory inside /webroot/ called Symfony. All of the files now exist within the correct directory. The configuration is correct and there are no items that Symfony claims need to be changed in /config.php.

The issue comes when I attempt to load /app_dev.php. It throws an exception claiming that it cannot create a file named cache in the /app directory.

As chmod +a is not supported within the vagrant box I am using, I elected to set permissions by uncommenting umask(0000) in app_dev. Assuming it was a permission problem, I tried using chmod to adjust the permissions both within the vagrant environment and within osx to 777 for everything.

What's strange is that when I chmod a file or directory inside the vagrant environment, it claims to set 777 correctly but then when I ls -l, the permissions have not changed. However, when I chmod a file or directory from OUTSIDE The vagrant environment within the webroot folder, the permissions persist. As symfony does not have r/w permissions within the environment, it cannot create the necessary cache and log files. When i run symfony from the command from osx, everything works fine.

Does anyone have any insight as to how to change the permissions for the /webroot directory so things within the vagrant environment can actually read and write to it as chmod doesn't appear to work?

Answer 1

Update as of 15th Jan 2016. Instructions for Vagrant 1.7.4+ and Symfony 3. This works.

On a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 install, ACL was installed but I couldn't use +a or setfacl to fix the permissions issues, and of course, as soon as you change any permissions in terminal in vagrant, they're reset to vagrant:vagrant again.

I added the following to my vagrant file:

# Symfony needs to be able to write to it's cache, logs and sessions directory in var/
config.vm.synced_folder "./var", "/vagrant/var",
 :owner => 'vagrant',
 :group => 'www-data',
 :mount_options => ["dmode=775","fmode=666"]

This tells Vagrant to sync var/logs and var/cache (not to be confused with /var/, these are in the root Symfony directory) and have them owned by vagrant:www-data. This is the same as doing a sudo chown vagrant:www-data var/, except Vagrant now does it for you and enforces that instead of enforcing vagrant:vagrant.

Note there are no 777 'hacks' here.

As soon as I added that, I didn't get any more permissions errors in the apache log and I got a nice Symfony welcome screen. I hope that helps someone!

Answer 2

I think it's a question of user rights. Your apache + php is probably launched by root. You have to set rights with root.

Two possibilities :

sudo su
chmod -R 777 app/cache

or

sudo chown -v app/cache
sudo chmod -R 777 app/cache

You will probably have to do the same thing with the log file.

My vagrant file if you need it :

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "precise64"  #Box Name
  config.vm.box_url = "http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box" #Box Location
  config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |virtualbox|
      virtualbox.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "2048"]
  end
  config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/home/vagrant/synced/", :nfs => true
  #config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 80, host: 8080 # Forward 8080 rquest to vagrant 80 port
  config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "1.2.3.4"
  config.vm.network :public_network
  config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "vagrant.sh"
end

vagrant.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

#VM Global Config
apt-get update

#Linux requirement
apt-get install -y vim git

#Apache Install
apt-get install -y apache2

#Apache Configuration
rm -rf /var/www
ln -fs /home/vagrant/synced/web /var/www
chmod -R 755 /home/vagrant/synced

#Php Install
apt-get install -y python-software-properties
add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php5
apt-get update

apt-get install -y php5 libapache2-mod-php5

#Php Divers
apt-get install -y php5-intl php-apc php5-gd php5-curl

#PhpUnit
apt-get install -y phpunit
pear upgrade pear
pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear channel-discover components.ez.no
pear channel-discover pear.symfony.com
pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit


#Php Configuration
sed -i "s/upload_max_filesize = 2M/upload_max_filesize = 10M/" /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
sed -i "s/short_open_tag = On/short_open_tag = Off/" /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
sed -i "s/;date.timezone =/date.timezone = Europe\/London/" /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
sed -i "s/memory_limit = 128M/memory_limit = 1024M/" /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
sed -i "s/_errors = Off/_errors = On/" /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

#Reload apache configuration
/etc/init.d/apache2 reload

#Composer
php -r "eval('?>'.file_get_contents('https://getcomposer.org/installer'));"
mv -f composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer.phar
alias composer='/usr/local/bin/composer.phar'

#Postgres
apt-get install -y postgresql postgresql-client postgresql-client php5-pgsql
su - postgres -c "psql -U postgres -d postgres -c \"alter user postgres with password 'vagrant';\""

Answer 3

An updated answer for nfs:

config.vm.synced_folder "www", "/var/www", type:nfs, :nfs => { :mount_options => ["dmode=777","fmode=777"] }

Answer 4

Nothing worked for me other than changing location of cache and logs folder to /tmp

AppKernel.php

public function getCacheDir()
{
    if (in_array($this->getEnvironment(), ['test','dev'])) {
        return '/tmp/sfcache/'.$this->getEnvironment();
    }
    return parent::getCacheDir();
}

public function getLogDir()
{
    if (in_array($this->getEnvironment(), ['test','dev'])) {
        return '/tmp/sflogs/'.$this->getEnvironment();
    }
    return parent::getLogDir();
}