The first practical thing that we are going to do in this course, is to install the Apache Netbeans IDE. A personal recommendation for everyone who starts with the development of PHP and especially Symfony is to use Netbeans as it's one of the best IDEs for PHP that you can find nowadays for free. There are of course other options just like PHPStorm, however, it's a commercial product.
Netbeans has the advantage to be a cross-platform IDE just like PHPStorm and has a beautiful integration with Symfony, the autocomplete for PHP to type quite fast the names of the variables, including classes inside your project, and many other things that you will learn along with this course.
It's important to tell you right now that this is not a mandatory step because you can use the IDE of your preference or a simple code editor, like Sublime or Visual Studio Code, which is as well a great option to start and they're way more lightweight than Apache Netbeans, it all depends on your taste. You can even use the system notepad if you want and you're capable of working on it.
If you decide to continue with this course using Apache Netbeans, I will show you in this chapter how to easily install it in your Windows 10 system.
You can easily search for Apache Netbeans on Google or visit the official website https://netbeans.apache.org. Search for the downloads area and proceed to download the installer. There are 2 available versions, the Long-term support (LTS) and the latest version. In this case, I will use the latest version in Windows because I'm cool, you can pick the LTS version if you want.
After selecting the version, you will find the links to download the binaries of your platform, in this case, you need to select the Windows platform installer. Select the first available server and the download will start and it will take a while.
Once the download finishes, run the executable to start with the installation. You need to accept the license agreement and provide the installation path of Netbeans, we will use the default directory. One thing you need to have installed as well on your system is the Java Development Kit that you can obtain from the official oracle website. If you don't have the Java development kit installed, install it first before proceeding with the installation of Netbeans. In our case, it's already installed, so we need to provide the installation directory of the kit which is usually configured automatically. Then, proceed with the installation as usual and wait until it finishes. Once it's done, you can easily start Netbeans searching for it in the windows search menu.
This is the tool that we'll use in this course to develop smoothly our Symfony applications. I will explain to you further features and how to use them in the next chapters.
Become a more social person