Deploying Symfony 8 to cPanel Step by Step guide.

Table of Contents Introduction Double-check everything Configure your Environment Variables Install/Update your Vendors Clear your Symfony Cache Install symfony/apache-pack Update composer.json public directory Build the assets Update Kernel.php Upload the project to cPanel Final Thoughts Introduction I'm new to Symfony and recently, I deployed a Symfony app to a shared hosting environment running cPanel with no SSH access. I could not figure out the best way to do it, let alone find useful resources online as most of them are outdated and felt inefficient. I faced a lot of errors like: failing to load the app with a 500 Internal Server Error, some static assets not loading, etc. I figured it out in the end. This motivated me to write this post to reduce the headache for other Symfony newbies like me. Alright, let's get into it. Most deployment guides online assume you can run Composer, clear caches, execute migrations, and run Symfony commands directly on the server. In shared hosting environments, that is often not possible so, my examples will assume you don't have it installed on the server. 1. Double-check everything The first step to building for production is double-checking everything if it's in intact. Yes, this is very important. In my case, I was faced with some static image assets failing to load because of wrong reference which was ignored on dev mode. I had something like: asset('/images/<filename> ) which was working in dev mode but failed to load the image in prod. the paths had to be like: asset('images/'). This was after checking how I defined other assets. So avoid things like this before hand. 2. Configure your Environment Variables For this, we will use the dotenv:dump command which is not registered by default, so you must register first in your services: # config/services.yaml services : Symfony\Component\Dotenv\Command\DotenvDumpCommand : ~ Then, run the command below. After running this command, Symfony will create and load the .env.local.ph