On the Symfony Finland site there's a tutorial posted showing you how to run Symfony without a web server using Docker and PHP-PM.

Docker containers have been becoming an increasingly common deployment method in the past few years. I've deployed some Node.js app in containers, which are very simple to deploy as there's a single process that's easy to run. I found running PHP to be more complex.

[...] When running Nginx and PHP-FPM you are forced to run a pair of of containers, one for PHP-FPM and one for PHP-NPM. [...] But I would rather just run a single process to run the application. This is how Go, Node.js and even .NET Core apps are deployed. Can PHP do without a middle man?

While it may not be the most performant way to run a PHP and Symfony application, the author wanted to try it out and see how difficult it might be. The code for the setup is provided and, while the end result was a bit difficult to get to, it was possible.

On the Symfony Finland site there's a post that makes a recommendation for your Symfony framework based projects: give Docker a try to make setup and maintenance simpler.

During the first half of 2016 the web development community has talked about Docker quite a bit. The technology has been around since 2013, but during the last few months it has matured and started being adopted for mainstream web development. Docker is a great fit for Symfony projects too.

[...] Docker takes an approach where it wraps a piece of software into something known as a container. These containers are shipped complete with the application code, a runtime, system tools and libraries. Containers are thus guaranteed to always run the same, but can share files and networking with the host and other containers.

They then talk about how this "containerized" setup can be used to your advantage, making it simpler to get a Symfony application up and running with a few commands. The post then gets into an example setup of a Symfony Docker environment complete with Nginx, Varnish and PHP-FPM installed and linked. There's also setup for MySQL and Redis rounding out the data storage side. A quick "docker-composer up" command and, if all goes as expected, the environment is set up and waiting for your application.