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01.

Installing Doctrine

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Friends! Welcome back to the third episode in our starting in Symfony 4 series! We've done some really cool stuff already, but it's time to explore deeper in an epic search for intelligent life... and also.. and database! Yea - what good is our cool interstellar space news site... without being able to insert and query for data?

But... actually... Symfony does not have a database layer. Nope, for this challenge, we're going to rely one of Symfony's BFF's: an external library called Doctrine. Doctrine has great integration with Symfony and is crazy powerful. It also has a reputation for being a little bit hard to learn. But, a lot has improved over the last few years.

Code with Me!

If you also want to be best-friends-forever with Doctrine, you should totally code along with me. Download the course code from this page. When you unzip it, you'll find a start/ directory that has the same code that you see here. Open the README.md file for details on how to get the project setup... and of course, a space poem.

The last step will be to open a terminal, move into the project and run:

php bin/console server:run

to start the built in web server. Then, float over to your browser, and open http://localhost:8000 to discover... The Space Bar! Our inter-planetary, and extraterrestrial news site that spreads light on dark matters everywhere.

In the first two episodes, we already added some pretty cool stuff! But, these articles are still just hard-coded. Time to change that.

Installing Doctrine

Because Doctrine is an external library, before we do anything else, we need to install it! Thanks to Symfony flex, this is super easy. Open a new terminal tab and just run:

composer require doctrine

This will download a "pack" that contains a few libraries, including doctrine itself and also a migrations library to help manage database changes on production. More on that soon.

And... done! Hey! That's a nice message. Because we're going to be talking to a database, obviously, we will need to configure our database details somewhere. The message tells us that - no surprise - this is done in the .env file.

Configuring the Database Connection

Move over to your code and open the .env file. Nice! The DoctrineBundle recipe added a new DATABASE_URL environment variable:

22 lines | .env.dist
// ... lines 1 - 15
###> doctrine/doctrine-bundle ###
# Format described at http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-dbal/en/latest/reference/configuration.html#connecting-using-a-url
# For an SQLite database, use: "sqlite:///%kernel.project_dir%/var/data.db"
# Configure your db driver and server_version in config/packages/doctrine.yaml
DATABASE_URL=mysql://db_user:db_password@127.0.0.1:3306/db_name
###

Let's set this up: I use a root user with no password locally. Call the database the_spacebar:

22 lines | .env.dist
// ... lines 1 - 15
###> doctrine/doctrine-bundle ###
# Format described at http://docs.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-dbal/en/latest/reference/configuration.html#connecting-using-a-url
# For an SQLite database, use: "sqlite:///%kernel.project_dir%/var/data.db"
# Configure your db driver and server_version in config/packages/doctrine.yaml
DATABASE_URL=mysql://root:@127.0.0.1:3306/symfony4_space_bar
###

Of course, this sets a DATABASE_URL environment variable. And it is used in a new config/packages/doctrine.yaml file that was installed by the recipe. If you scroll down a bit... you can see the environment variable being used:

31 lines | config/packages/doctrine.yaml
parameters:
# Adds a fallback DATABASE_URL if the env var is not set.
# This allows you to run cache:warmup even if your
# environment variables are not available yet.
# You should not need to change this value.
env(DATABASE_URL): ''
doctrine:
dbal:
// ... lines 10 - 17
# With Symfony 3.3, remove the `resolve:` prefix
url: '%env(resolve:DATABASE_URL)%'
// ... lines 20 - 31

There are actually a lot of options in here, but you probably won't need to change any of them. These give you nice defaults, like using UTF8 tables:

31 lines | config/packages/doctrine.yaml
// ... lines 1 - 7
doctrine:
dbal:
// ... lines 10 - 12
charset: utf8mb4
// ... lines 14 - 31

Or, consistently using underscores for table and column names:

31 lines | config/packages/doctrine.yaml
// ... lines 1 - 7
doctrine:
// ... lines 9 - 19
orm:
// ... line 21
naming_strategy: doctrine.orm.naming_strategy.underscore
// ... lines 23 - 31

If you want to use something other than MySQL, you can easily change that. Oh, and you should set your server_version to the server version of MySQL that you're using on production:

31 lines | config/packages/doctrine.yaml
// ... lines 1 - 7
doctrine:
dbal:
# configure these for your database server
driver: 'pdo_mysql'
server_version: '5.7'
// ... lines 13 - 31

This helps Doctrine with a few subtle, version-specific changes.

Creating the Database

And... yea! With one composer require command and one line of config, we're setup! Doctrine can even create the database for you. Go back to your terminal and run

php bin/console doctrine:database:create

Say hello to your new database! Well, it's not that interesting: it's completely empty.

So let's add a table, by creating an entity class.