The plug-in ads a Symfony view to Eclipse which extends the normal PHP Perspective in PDT (PDT stands for PHP Development Tools) an gives us a direct access to all framework-defined actions plus there’s a helpful YAML editor included for Symfony configuration files ( and last but not least a nice ‘s’ icon appears next to Symfony projects ).

What is Eclipse? It’s a big open-source community project aimed to create a “development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle“. Especially Java developers will find it useful (or even as a must-have software), but it also offers an extensive IDE for C/C++, PHP… and much more.

It seems that as for the moment Symfoclipse works properly only with Symfony 1.0.X.
You can still use it with 1.1 or later but you won’t get much more than a YML editor.

0. You’ll definitely need Symfony up and running

( Symfony Framework installation guide. )

1a. All-In-One Pack = Eclipse + PDT – for those who don’t have Eclipse installed.

As said before Symfoclipse needs Eclipse with a PDT plug-in configured. The easiest way to do that is to download a All-In-One bundle which works out of the box ( I strongly recommend getting a Release Build from the PDT download | PDT Home ). You’ll also need to have a Java SE 5.0+ installed on your PC (you probably have – but it maybe worth upgrading anyway). The install process is quite straight forward – just extract the zip file and your done.

Getting used to Eclipse layout and functionality may take a while, but there are many great manuals out there. And it’s worth it.

1b. Installing PDT – if you already have Eclipse.

If you have Eclipse you can install PDT by its update manager. Go to Help Software Updates Find and Install. Choose the “Search For New Feature to Install“, add a new site (”New Remote Site…”) with the following link “http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/updates/” and press Next to start the update process. In case of any problems refer to the Eclipse Wiki.

2. Downloading and installing Symfoclipse

The installation process is the same as with most Eclipse plug-ins and it’s done via the update manager. Go to Help Software Updates Find and Install. Choose the “Search For New Feature to Install“, add a new site with the “http://noy.cc/symfoclipse/” link and press Next to start the updating. After the download has finished you’ll need to restart Eclipse and you’re done.

Symfoclipse functionality

Symfony View

It’s a modified PHP Exlporer view and it can be activated by selecting Symfony View in Show View (Window Show View Other). It enables the CLI (Command Line Interface) commands to be accessible directly by right-clicking the Symfony directories in project listing.

So let’s start off with a first app. After creating a normal PHP project (File New PHP Project) we need to right-click it’s icon and select “Init Project” from the very bottom of the context menu. The result is the same as entering symfony init-project in the command line and you can notice all the messages appearing in the Console.

After the project initialization you can right-click again ( notice the ‘s‘ icon is added ) – you should see more Symfony Framework functions available.

YAML Editor

Symfoclipse adds also an YAML editor, which is very simple but has one functionality worth mentioning – a build-in auto validator that comes in handy when editing Symfony’s configuration files ( which tend do be easily buggable ).

The editors automatically opens .yml and .yaml files from our projects. If you want to open a different file with it you’ll need to right-click it an choose Open With Symfoclipse YAML Editor