Rafael Dohms has a new post sharing the results of one of his recent struggles - getting a Symfony2 application deployed to the PagodaBox service using Composer to manage the packages. In the post he details each step of the process.

I have been working on a little pet project and wanted to put it up somewhere to show to a few people how it was going. I wanted something really simple so I decided to give the PHP PaaS solutions a try. Its a very simple Symfony 2.1 based app using Composer for vendor management, so I went on a quest to see what could be done and how.

He shares the contents of his Boxfile (a special file PagodaBox uses to configure your application) with entries for writeable directories, extensions to load and the database configuration. He found that, during deployment, everything is writeable by the "build" user, so there's no worries about installing Composer dependencies.

In this new tutorial on NetTuts.com Phil Sturgeon looks at how to "elevate your PHP" to a cloud-based hosting service, specifically Pagoda Box.

This article will walk you through cloud hosting for your PHP application with Pagoda Box. It’ll detail how to handle PHP dependencies, get your MySQL databases up and running (and debug locally), and customise various aspects of PHP with ease.

He walks you through the entire process you'll need to fire up a (free) application on their service (including a database!):

• Sign up for a new account
• Create an application
• Set up git
• Create your public SSH key and upload it to Pagoda
• Commit to your repository and deploy your code

He also mentions a custom option Pagoda Box has included in their series - the Boxfile. This configuration file allows you to set up things like the environment you want your app to run in (PHP 5.3, MySQLi extension, etc) and set up some of the php.ini configuration settings. He also shows you how to set up the database instance and how to use their "pagoda" gem to create a temporary SSH tunnel from your development environment to their database server. He also briefly mentions the option they have of using a real domain name to point to your application.