sudo dpkg -r –force-depends

I have no idea why this is so hard to find – you could spend an hour reading the dpkg man page and never figure it out, and most posts on forums don’t seem to even understand this issue. There seems to be an attitude that you shouldn’t do this, as though you are morally bound to rules about what software you may and may not have on your own computer. I have on several occasions had to completely remove and reinstall corrupted files. The only logical way to do this is to ignore dependency warnings. Besides, I use Linux because I don’t like people making rules about what I ought to do with my own machine. I hope this post helps someone in the same fix as I am.

all:
  .settings:
    timeout:    false

But if you are using the stable 1.0 branch of symfony, this will do just
the opposite – it will make your sessions time out immediately! To make
this work, we have to override sfBasicSecurityUser‘s initialize() method. I will describe two ways
to do this; one is a short hack, the other is longer and somewhat more proper.

Here’s the short way:

class myUser extends sfBasicSecurityUser
{
  public function initialize($context, $parameters = null)
  {
    if (sfConfig::get('sf_timeout') == 0) {
      // session will expire if window is open for a day
      sfConfig::set('sf_timeout', 86400);
    }

    return parent::initialize($context, $parameters);
  }
}

This works because the sf_timeout setting is not used by
any other class (at the moment), so changing it doesn’t have any side
effects. If you set your timeout to 0 or false, symfony will always
think you have set the session timeout to 24 hours, but the session will
actually expire when the user closes the browser window.
If you are not comfortable with “hacks” like the above, you could copy the initialize() method from
sfBasicSecurityUser, change it in the appropriate place, and skip calling the parent constructor altogether.
Unfortunately, sfBasicSecurityUser calls its parent constructor, so you have to rewrite them both:

class myUser extends sfBasicSecurityUser
{
  public function initialize($context, $parameters = null)
  {
    $this->context = $context;

    $this->parameterHolder = new sfParameterHolder();
    $this->parameterHolder->add($parameters);

    $this->attributeHolder = new sfParameterHolder(self::ATTRIBUTE_NAMESPACE);

    // read attributes from storage
    $attributes = $context->getStorage()->read(self::ATTRIBUTE_NAMESPACE);
    if (is_array($attributes))
    {
      foreach ($attributes as $namespace => $values)
      {
        $this->attributeHolder->add($values, $namespace);
      }
    }

    // set the user culture to sf_culture parameter if present in the request
    // otherwise
    //  - use the culture defined in the user session
    //  - use the default culture set in i18n.yml
    if (!($culture = $context->getRequest()->getParameter('sf_culture')))
    {
      if (null === ($culture = $context->getStorage()->read(self::CULTURE_NAMESPACE)))
      {
        $culture = sfConfig::get('sf_i18n_default_culture', 'en');
      }
    }

    $this->setCulture($culture);

    // read data from storage
    $storage = $this->getContext()->getStorage();

    $this->authenticated = $storage->read(self::AUTH_NAMESPACE);
    $this->credentials   = $storage->read(self::CREDENTIAL_NAMESPACE);
    $this->lastRequest   = $storage->read(self::LAST_REQUEST_NAMESPACE);

    if ($this->authenticated == null)
    {
      $this->authenticated = false;
      $this->credentials   = array();
    }
    else
    {
      // Automatic logout logged in user if no request within [sf_timeout] setting
      if (0 != sfConfig::get('sf_timeout') && null !== $this->lastRequest && (time() -
$this->lastRequest) > sfConfig::get('sf_timeout'))
      {
        if (sfConfig::get('sf_logging_enabled'))
        {
          $this->getContext()->getLogger()->info('{sfUser} automatic user logout due to timeout');
        }
        $this->setTimedOut();
        $this->setAuthenticated(false);
      }
    }

    $this->lastRequest = time();

  }
}

That should do it!

class myUnitTest extends sfPropelTest
{
  public function setup()
  {
    $this->bob = UserPeer::retrieveByPK('bob');
  }

  public function teardown()
  {
    $this->diag('Test method complete!');
  }

  public function test_user()
  {
    $this->is($this->bob->getId(), 'bob', 'Bob exists!');

    $user = new User();
    $user->setFirstName('Joe');
    $user->setLastName('Smith');
    $user->setUsername('joe');
    $user->save();

    $joe = UserPeer::getBy(UserPeer::USERNAME, 'joe');
    $this->isa_ok($joe, 'User', 'Joe exists!');
  }

  public function test_dataDelete()
  {
    $this->is($this->bob->getId(), 'bob', 'Bob still exists!');

    $joe = UserPeer::getBy(UserPeer::USERNAME, 'joe');
    $this->ok(!$joe, 'Joe no longer exists.');
  }
}

$test = new myUnitTest();
$test->execute();

If you’ve written tests in Ruby on Rails, the above should look familiar. If not, let’s go through the code:

The first two lines are setup: The first line tells symfony what application to test – in this case, “myApp” – and the second line includes the code we need to test against the database. Next we define our “test case” – a class that extends sfPropelTest, which is itself a child of lime_test. Every method that begins with “test_” will be called in turn, with our test data being reloaded between each call. Also, the setup() method, if defined, will be called immediately before each test method, and the teardown() method, if defined, will be called immediately after. The last two lines create a new instance of our test suite, and call its execute() method, which runs our tests.

There you have it – a quick and painless way to run unit tests in symfony. One less excuse for not writing them!

The default Propel builders can be found in the symfony source in these places:

symfony/addon/propel/builder/sfObjectBuilder.php
symfony/addon/propel/builder/sfPeerBuilder.php

The classes these inherit from are buried. They can be found here:

symfony/vendor/propel-generator/classes/propel/engine/builder/om/php5/PHP5ComplexObjectBuilder.php
symfony/vendor/propel-generator/classes/propel/engine/builder/om/php5/PHP5ComplexPeerBuilder.php