A few notes on getting Symfony 1.2 to run on a Dreamhost server. Dreamhost is perfectly capable of running Symfony, but you need to make sure of a few things.

You need PHP 5 to run Symfony. It is currently installed by default, but it’s only the default for the apache user. If you ssh into your server and try to run ’symfony cc’ or any other command, it bombs or errors out. This is because in the command line under your ssh user for some reason they default to PHP 4. (go ahead, ssh in and run ‘php -v’. you’ll see.)

I fixed this by doing the following…

1. edit your ~/.bash_profile and add the line ‘alias php=/usr/local/php5/bin/php’
That will make PHP 5 the default when typing ‘php -v’ or any other php command into the terminal.

2. change how you use the ./symfony command. If your like me, you just type ./symfony cc or whatever when typing. You need to type ‘php ./symfony cc’ instead, to make sure you use your alias to run symfony under PHP 5

References
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Installing_PHP5#Using_DreamHost.27s_PHP_5