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Talking to Databases in PHP

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Talking to Databases in PHP

If you don’t have the code for the project downloaded yet, get it now. After it downloads, unzip it. Perfect! All we need to do now is start the built-in PHP web server so we can execute our code. Open up a terminal, move into the directory where you just unzipped the code, and start the server:

php -S localhost:8000

Unless I’ve messed something up, I should be able to go to http://localhost:8000 and see our site. There it is!

Connecting to MySQL in PHP

We’re about to take a huge step by talking to our database from inside our code. Actually, making queries from PHP is simpler than what we did in the last few chapters. But just like before, step 1 is to connect to the server. Open up index.php and create a new PDO object. This shows off a new syntax which we will cover in a second:

// index.php

$pdo = new PDO('mysql:dbname=air_pup;host=localhost', 'root', null);
// ...

This creates a connection to the server, but doesn’t make any queries. It’s the PHP version of when we typed the first mysql command in the terminal to the server.

Before we dissect it, let’s query for our pets! We’re going to use a function called query but with a new syntax. Set the result to a $result variable. Next, call another function called fetchAll and set it to a $rows variable. Dump $rows so we can check it out:

// index.php

$pdo = new PDO('mysql:dbname=air_pup;host=localhost', 'root', null);
$result = $pdo->query('SELECT * FROM pet');
$rows = $result->fetchAll();
var_dump($rows);
// ...

Ready to see what the data looks like? Refresh your homepage.

Hey, it’s an array with 2 items: one for each row in the pet table. Each item is an associative array with the column names as keys. For convenience, it also repeats each value with an indexed key, but we won’t need that extra stuff, so pretend it’s not there.

What’s really cool is that the array already looks like the one that get_pets gives us. If we temporarily comment out that function and use the array from the database by renaming $rows to $pets, our page should work!!

// index.php
// ...
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:dbname=air_pup;host=localhost', 'root', null);
$result = $pdo->query('SELECT * FROM pet');
$pets = $result->fetchAll();

require 'lib/functions.php';

//$pets = get_pets();

// ...

Refresh! No errors, and the page shows 2 pets. Sure, they’re not very interesting since our 2 pets don’t have age, weights, bios or images, but we could fill those in easily in PHPMyAdmin.