Distributing Symfony applications is quite complicated. To run a Symfony project in production, a web server, a PHP executor, and - usually - a database server need to be installed. Their versions and configurations must be compatible and the app. Because PHP is an interpreted language, the application source code must also be available. Composer dependencies as well... and things are even more difficult if some of them are private.

Of course, these days, containers can help. But what if we could make it even simpler: a single distributable binary that's self-executing? Download a single file, give it the execution bit, and type "./my-app run": boom! Your Symfony application is up and running, served over HTTP/3 with a valid TLS certificate!

Thanks to the latest new features of FrankenPHP, the dream is now a reality! Let's discover how to ship Symfony applications as standalone binaries, web server, PHP and database system included!