The "Symfony Demo Application" is a reference application created to show how to develop Symfony applications following the recommended best practices.

• PHP 5.5.9 or higher;
• PDO-SQLite PHP extension enabled;
• and the usual Symfony application requirements.

If unsure about meeting these requirements, download the demo application and browse the http://localhost:8000/config.php script to get more detailed information.

First, install the Symfony Installer if you haven't already. Then, install the Symfony Demo Application executing this command anywhere in your system:

$ symfony demo

# if you're using Windows:
$ php symfony demo

If the demo command is not available, update your Symfony Installer to the most recent version executing the symfony self-update command.

NOTE

If you can't use the Symfony Installer, download and install the demo application using Git and Composer:

$ git clone https://github.com/symfony/symfony-demo symfony_demo
$ cd symfony_demo/
$ composer install --no-interaction

There is no need to configure a virtual host in your web server to access the application. Just use the built-in web server:

$ cd symfony_demo/
$ php bin/console server:run

This command will start a web server for the Symfony application. Now you can access the application in your browser at http://localhost:8000. You can stop the built-in web server by pressing Ctrl + C while you're in the terminal.

NOTE

If you want to use a fully-featured web server (like Nginx or Apache) to run Symfony Demo application, configure it to point at the web/ directory of the project. For more details, see: https://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/configuration/web_server_configuration.html

The current Symfony Demo application uses Symfony 3.x version. If you want to use the legacy Symfony 2.8 version, clone the Git repository and checkout the v0.8.4 tag, which is the last one compatible with Symfony 2.8:

$ git clone https://github.com/symfony/symfony-demo symfony_demo
$ cd symfony_demo/
$ git checkout tags/v0.8.4 -b v0.8.4
$ composer install