Symfony2 app.php works but not app_dev.php

Question

I've deployed my Symfony2 project to my development server and want to run the dev environment.

Everything is running fine if I use /app.php but if I try app_dev.php I get a 404 error:

The requested URL /app_dev.php was not found on this server.

Below is a copy of my .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    Options +FollowSymlinks
    RewriteEngine On

    # Explicitly disable rewriting for front controllers
    RewriteRule ^app_dev.php - [L]
    RewriteRule ^app.php - [L]

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

    # Change below before deploying to production
    #RewriteRule ^(.*)$ app.php [QSA,L]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ app_dev.php [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

It works fine on my local machine, just not on my development server, any ideas why?

My /cache and /logs directories are both have 777 permissions and are owned by www-data:

drwxrwxrwx+ 4 www-data www-data 4096 Mar 15 11:46 cache
drwxrwxrwx+ 2 www-data www-data 4096 Mar 15 11:05 logs

dev and prod within these directories are exactly the same.

Answer 1

Check your app_dev.php it has a restriction to deny access to the dev environment from other computers than the server itself.

This is for security reasons, if you deploy to a production server and a user would have access to dev env, then he/she could know a lot about your application.

// This check prevents access to debug front controllers that are deployed by accident to production servers.
// Feel free to remove this, extend it, or make something more sophisticated.
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'])
    || isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'])
    || !in_array(@$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], array('127.0.0.1', 'fe80::1', '::1'))
) {
    header('HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden');
    exit('You are not allowed to access this file. Check '.basename(__FILE__).' for more information.');
}

You must add your IP to that array, or remove the whole thing (I wouln't recommend that).

Always remember passing the dev variable to AppKernel. $kernel = new AppKernel('dev', true);