Sometimes you dont have access to your shell, maybe because the services of your hoster only includes ftp or whatever the reason is. But you want to set up a clean installation environment for your typo3 website. For this step you totally need symlinks! Luckily my PHP loving co-worker got a great tip for this specific problem. You can create symlinks with the PHP function symlinks. Just declare your symlinks in php file, upload the file to your ftp directory and with your browser you have to execute this php file and your symlinks are created.

symlinks.php

<?php
    symlink ( "typo3_src/index.php", "index.php" );
?>

Now you can perform a clean typo3 installation, unless you dont get problems with other php settings during your typo3 installation check.