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 macOS Big Sur system.
Unlike what you think we would do to install Netbeans in Mac, we won't visit the official website of Apache Netbeans because it's very probable that it won't work as there's an issue currently with the Java Development Kit in this system. As first, search for JDK in Google and navigate to the oracle website. Right now, the latest available version of the Java Development Kit is version 16. Download the macOS installer and wait until it finishes. You will need an oracle account that you can create on the same page in case you don't have one.
Run the installer and follow the installation wizard. Once it's done, you should be able now to install Netbeans using Homebrew. Homebrew is a free and open-source software package management system that simplifies the installation of software on Apple's operating system macOS as well as Linux. In case you don't have Homebrew installed, I will add a link to the installation tutorial of Homebrew in the description of the video so you can install it before proceeding with the next step.
If you have homebrew already installed, you can proceed with the installation of Netbeans, which is simple with a single command. Launch a new terminal and type the command brew install Netbeans. In our case, as we are working on the new Macbook with the Apple Silicon, we need to prepend the arch -x86_64 to the command or it won't run properly. The setup will find the latest JDK installed on your Macbook and will download and install Netbeans. As soon as the execution finishes, you should be able now to launch Netbeans from the launchpad as you would with any other application on your Mac.
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