The Background

At my work, we deal with a project where we have several development servers, a few staging servers, and hundreds of production servers.

The Issue

Having to deal with all four different environment types, without having environments hardcoded into the project is a little weird, and currently lacks much any real solutions, regarding symfony's documentation.

The Solution - Short

In short, I implemented a class that we use in app/console and web/app.php, that reads an Apache environment variable or a php.ini variable with get_cfg_var().

The Solution - Long

Update - April 20th, 2014

I've recently moved the code to a new repository:
http://www.github.com/aequasi/environment-php

Like I said above, I made an Environment class to check what environment the server belongs in. I made it a gist for you guys: https://gist.github.com/5753723.git.

Basically, this environment class, can take an ArgvInput param as a constructor, and if it does, it assumes that it's CLI. If it's CLI, it will do the same CLI checks the symfony does by default for $env, and $debug. Cli and web both allow for specifying symfony.environment in php.ini as well, and the web piece allows you to specify an apache env variable (e.g. SetEnv SYM_ENV stage).

Once you've got that code, place it into app/Environment.php (you'll have to create it). From there, copy the logic I've got for app/consle and web/app.php below.

[symfony]
symfony.environment = staging

<?php
set_time_limit(0);

require_once __DIR__.'/bootstrap.php.cache';
require_once __DIR__.'/AppKernel.php';
require_once __DIR__ .'/../app/Environment.php';

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Console\Application;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\ArgvInput;

$input = new ArgvInput( );
$env = new \Environment( $input );


$kernel = new AppKernel( $env->getEnvironment(), $env->getDebug() );
$application = new Application($kernel);
$application->run( $input );

<?php

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;

$loader = require_once __DIR__.'/../app/bootstrap.php.cache';
require_once __DIR__.'/../app/AppKernel.php';
require_once __DIR__ .'/../app/Environment.php';

$env = new \Environment();

$kernel = new AppKernel( $env->getEnvironment(), $env->getDebug() );
$kernel->loadClassCache();
Request::enableHttpMethodParameterOverride();
$request = Request::createFromGlobals();
$response = $kernel->handle($request);
$response->send();
$kernel->terminate($request, $response);