A skeleton allowing you to create an empty Symfony application: it is provided without any libraries or bundles (except for Symfony's FrameworkBundle).

You can then start building on it, and install the dependencies you need.

Note: The Symfony Standard Edition provides a big set of libraries and bundles (database, email, templating, etc). If you don't feel comfortable with picking your own yet, you should probably use it.

Use Composer to create a new application:

composer create-project gnugat/symfony-empty-edition my-project

• Only 2 bundles: src/AppBundle and symfony/framework-bundle, add the ones you really need
• Only 1 front controller (web/app.php), change the environment using the SYMFONY_ENV environment variable
• No annotations (can be brought back by installing sensio/framework-extra-bundle)

There are many real world use cases for this distribution. Here's a small selection:

• tailored made applications: for applications that require "non standard" dependencies (e.g. Propel or Pomm for the database, etc)
• micro applications: for applications that don't need database, templating or mailing systems (Symfony can be a Micro Framework)
• legacy migrations: for applications that need to depend on legacy database, templating, etc while migrating to symfony
• teaching material: better explained here