Symphony.

I've been trying to install Symphony on my external host for a while now… Everything seems to work out nicely with the installation and the creation of database tables and so on… However I keep on getting a "500 Internal Server Error" when trying to access the directory in which I've put Symphony in.

Up until now the only way I've been able to get it all up and running has been by commenting out the Options +FollowSymlinks -Indexes part of the .htaccess file created by Symphony during setup… Although I'm happy it seems to be working I can't help but wonder what this actually means? How does it affect Symphony's functionality?

It won't for the most part.

-Indexes prevents the directory listing appearing if someone was to go to /symphony/assets/

+FollowSymlinks just lets Apache know that it should follow symlinks to resolve file paths. It's useful if you place the symphony folder somewhere separate to your working files.

Can you only remove one of the two to narrow down what might be causing this?

For me it seems that the host I'm using won't let me use neither one… I tried using the Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch -Indexes instead, but with no success. I don't know if this is caused by security measures or if it's basically because my host is making these configurations elsewhere.

Anyway, thanks for the answers! Everything seems to be running smoothly. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't messing with basic functionality so that I would… I don't know, have to switch framework right before deadline or something like that.

It is related to the hosting server you use. It does not allow these htaccess directives.