I love pretty URLs. I don’t like file name extensions unless they end with .html.

All versions of symfony save me from address bar ugliness, but only for the first application I create. Everything else is ass.php/backwards.

I’m going to give you two ways of beautifying your second, third, and forth applications so you can http://www.get.your/application/looking/sexy. Both methods involve creating a subdirectory.

Put it all in a subdirectory, and symlink your way out

So if you have an app named “admin,” you can do the following:

1. Create a directory in your web folder called admin
2. Copy your admin.php and admin_dev.php into this folder
3. Copy the .htaccess file into this folder
4. Rename admin.php to index.php
5. Edit the file now named index.php, and change the require_once statement at the top so it’s an extra directory back
6. Symbolically link the js, css, images, and uploads directories from within the admin directory to the directory above; so from your app directory: ln -s ../js

This is what I usually do in a Linux environment. However, I’m developing on a Windows box, and symbolic links don’t translate easily between Windows and Linux. So here’s the second option, without using symbolic links:

Put just the .htaccess in a subdirectory

1. As before, create a subdirectory in your web folder for the admin.
2. Copy the .htaccess file in, and at the very bottom of the file, change index.php to ../admin.php. It should read RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ../admin.php [QSA,L]
3. Edit your routing.yml file for the admin app, and append /admin/ to all of your routes.

That should about cover it. Also remember to set no_script_name to on in each of your applications.

Enjoy.

Alternative methods? Please leave comments.