Just had a little issue that seams to be common in the web. Got a new server with Plesk 11 (sorry for that) and it took me nearly a day to get it working and setup for capifony deployment of Symfony2 projects.

The typical issues with not correctly set access rights for the root directory of the project (should be 755), manually editing of parameters.ini and other stuff was ok. But what nearly killed me was that my Plesk installation always returned a 503 when running PHP as apache module. FastCGI was default and seemed to be working, so I went with this.

Unfortunately this did not work with the admin interface that was running in a “virtual” subdirectory. It was not possible to login. In the background it is using the default, simple, boring and potentially unsecure basic authentification.

Did you know that there is a problem with FastCGI, Symfony2 and basic authentification? I did not, but know I know. It is fixed in the current release (2.0.16) – which is good. But unfortunately there is a RewriteRule that has to be written inside your web/.htaccess. Check the comment in src/symfony/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/ServerBag.php:

* php-cgi under Apache does not pass HTTP Basic user/pass to PHP by default
* For this workaround to work, add this line to your .htaccess file:
* RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
*
* A sample .htaccess file:
* RewriteEngine On
* RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]

Unfortunately, I tried a different line that was written in the ticket above:

RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

This did not work, but resulted in 401 results for all requests. Just remove the ,l which means that this .htaccess file will be left.

So if you are running a Symfony2 project with FastCGI, add this line to your web/.htaccess file:

RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]