We all know, that web development is not as easy as it sounds and that it involves lot of different and sometimes really complex tools to just run or test stuff. We also know, that bootstrap (setup) of the project could take more time than you want it to. It's not a big deal if you're working on single project full time, but at KnpLabs, i'm bootstraping new sf2 project every 2 weeks. So this manual crafting of virtual host, edition of /etc/hosts and maintaining of those temp hosts everywhere made me really sick. So, at some point i've started to look for an elegant solution. Here is it.

He gives you all the commands, file contents and software you'll need to install (he uses Homebrew) to install dnsmasq and get it configured. The only Symfony-specific part of the process is the last step - getting the latest version of the framework and installing it.

While developing web applications on localhost you must have always missed the functionality to send mails. As localhost does not support email service, so it has always been a bottleneck for email testing on localhost. But I have found a simple way to test emails on localhost using PHP. I have overridden the default mail() function of PHP to create a text/html file based on the email format. If the email is in html format, an HTML file is created otherwise a text file is created. You can see in this file what exactly is the content sent in your mail. See how does it work.

He shows how to override the mail function with your own custom "mail" function, just in a difference namespace. He includes the sample code to send the email (the "mail" function), a basic HTML template you can use and and example of it in use.