So, I’ve had a bit more time to continue ambling up Symfony’s learning curve, and deployed a test app on Dreamhost.

I followed the instructions on Chatteren’s blog here, and they worked like a charm, although they omit to mention the need to ensure, on the Dreamhost panel, that the version of PHP for your domain is set to 5.x.x. Mine was set to 4 point something, presumably because I’ve had my account for a while, and this meant that although the PHP CLI was using version 5 point something, and was outputting perfect HTML to the command line when I executed the site’s pages, viewing the same pages through my browser gave me an ugly error instead. See my comments (#17 and #18) on Chatteren’s post for more details.

Also not mentioned in Chatteren’s post is the need to be careful with your MySQL settings (that is, if you’re using MySQL - which, if you’re on Dreamhost, you probably are). Be sure to read the Symfony documentation on the databases.yml and propel.ini files, and remember that once you’re hosting your site on Dreamhost (rather than on your workstation, which I’m guessing is where you started developing it), your database isn’t at “localhost” any more, Toto.

À bientôt.