Customizing Installation

After you have generated your project with the sympal installer you will want to start customizing your site. You can even begin to customize the installer so you can easily re-install your site to test changes, similar to how you would use the doctrine task doctrine:build --all when developing.

If you want to re-install sympal in your newly generated project you can do so by using the sympal:install task:

$ ./symfony sympal:install

This task accepts many optional arguments and options, if they are left blank the default installation information is used.

The above install task will blow away your database completely and re-install sympal and all your plugins. It is common to use this command to re-install your site when testing during development mode.

Core Data Fixtures

Sympal comes with a set of data fixtures that are always installed and used to populate your initial database when installing. These fixtures are responsible for setting up your first site, content type records, etc., but no site content.

• sfSympalPlugin/data/fixtures/install.yml

Extra Data Fixtures

Additional fixtures may also be supplied via plugins. For example, sfSympalPagesPlugin, which is a core sympal plugin, includes some data fixtures that populate some default content for your site, including menu items and content:

• sfSympalPlugin/lib/plugins/sfSympalPagesPlugin/data/fixtures/install.yml

By default, any yaml file that exists in the data/fixtures directory of a plugin will be processed when installing sympal.

These data fixtures can be overridden completely to create your own default content. To do this, create a directory named install at the root of your sympal project in the data/fixtures directory. Now, add some fixture files of your own, for example:

data/fixtures/install/install.yml

By creating this directory, sympal will no longer install the fixtures from the data/fixtures directory of your project or any plugin. Instead, sympal will load only the core fixtures and those located in your data/fixtures/install directory. This is a great way to replace the default fixtures with real content related to your site.

Post Install SQL

You can optionally execute custom SQL files at the end of the installation process. This nice little feature allows you to do things at the end of the installation that may be DBMS specific and can't be done through the ORM. Or you could use it to populate your newly created database with the initial data instead of using data fixtures.

You can execute SQL for the current connection or per connection by placing the files in specific locations in the project/data/sql directory. For example to have some globally executed SQL for each connection you can place the sql file in the data/sql/sympal_install directory.

// data/sql/sympal_install/install.sql
CREATE TABLE some_table (id BIGINT AUTO_INCREMENT, 
title VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, 
PRIMARY KEY(id)) ENGINE = INNODB;

Alternatively, you can execute custom SQL statements for each individual connection by placing the SQL files in a directory named after the connection name.

// data/sql/sympal_install/connection_name/install.sql
CREATE TABLE some_table (id BIGINT AUTO_INCREMENT, 
title VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, 
PRIMARY KEY(id)) ENGINE = INNODB;

Now when you run the installation process, the contents of these SQL files will be executed after everything else has finished being installed.

Post Install Hook

A simple post install hook is called at the end of the installation process to allow you to execute additional code when the install is done. The function is looked for on your ProjectConfiguration class. Since the core sympal fixtures located in sfSympalPlugin/data/fixtures/install.yml are always loaded, this is a good place to perform any customization you may need.

<?php
 
class ProjectConfiguration extends sfProjectConfiguration
{
  public function install()
  {
    // Do some extra work
    // Create default users
    // $user = new User();
    // ...
 
    // Customize the sfSympalSite object
    $site = Doctrine_Core::getTable('sfSympalSite')->findOneBySlug('sympal');
    $site->title = 'My sympal application';
    $site->save();
  }
}
 
?>

Pre & Post Install Events

When the installation process is invoked, a symfony event is fired before and after to allow you to execute custom code. The event names are sympal.pre_install and sympal.post_install.

<?php
 
$dispatcher->connect('sympal.post_install', array('MyInstall', 'postInstall'));
 
class MyInstall
{
  public static function postInstall(sfEvent $event)
  {
 
  }
}
 
?>