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04.

The "symfony console" Command & server_version

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Doctrine is now configured to talk to our database, which lives inside a Docker container. That's thanks to the fact that the Symfony dev server exposes this DATABASE_URL environment variable, which points to the container. For me, the container is accessible on port 50739.

Now let's make sure the actual database has been created. But first, in index.php, remove the dd()... then close that file.

Spin over to your terminal and run:

php bin/console

This prints every bin/console command that's available including a bunch of new ones that start with the word doctrine. Ooh. Most of these aren't very important and we'll walk through the ones that are along the way.

bin/console doctrine:database:create

For example, one is called doctrine:database:create. Cool, let's try it:

php bin/console doctrine:database:create

And... error! Look closely: it's trying to connect to port 5432. But our environment variable is pointing to port 50739! It's as if it's using the DATABASE_URL value from our .env file instead of the real one that's set by the Symfony binary.

And, in fact, that's exactly what's happening. And, it makes sense! When we refresh the page in our browser, that's processed through the symfony binary, which gives it the opportunity to add the environment variable.

But when we run a bin/console command - where console is just a PHP file that lives in a bin/ directory, the symfony binary is never used as part of that process. This means it never has the opportunity to add the environment variable. And so, Symfony falls back to using the value from .env.

To fix this, whenever we run a bin/console command that needs the Docker environment variables, instead of running bin/console, run symfony console:

symfony console doctrine:database:create

That's literally a shortcut to running bin/console: it's no different. But the fact that we're executing it through the symfony binary gives it the opportunity to add the environment variables.

When we try this... yes! We do get an error because apparently the database already exists, but it did successfully connect and talk to the database.

Configuring the server_version

Ok, there's one last bit of configuration that we need to set. Open config/packages/doctrine.yaml. This file came from the recipe. Find server_version and un-comment it.

43 lines | config/packages/doctrine.yaml
doctrine:
dbal:
// ... lines 3 - 6
server_version: '13'
// ... lines 8 - 43

This value "13" is referring to the version of my database engine. Since I'm using Postgres version 13, I need 13 here. If you're using MySQL, you might need 8 or 5.7.

This helps Doctrine determine which features your database does or doesn't support... since a newer version of a database might support features that an older version doesn't. It's not a particularly interesting piece of configuration, we just need to make sure it's set.

Ok team: all the boring setup is done. Next: let's create our first entity class! Entities are the most foundational concept in Doctrine and the key to talking to our first database table.