Connecting to Database

To enable Doctrine support in Symfony project, install symfony/orm-pack firstly.

Installing Doctrine ORM

Open a terminal, switch to the project root folder and run:

$ composer require symfony/orm-pack

The pack is a virtual Symfony package, it includes a bundle of PHP packages and predefined configurations.

When it is installed successfully, it will install several packages, updated the package.lock file, add intial Doctrine configurations into the config folder, and update the .env file to add database related configuration, such as connection URL, etc..

By the way, install symfony-maker-bundle.

$ composer require --dev symfony/maker-bundle

The maker-bundle provides a series of commands to generate skeleton codes from predefined template, including generating controllers, entities, repository, etc..

Configuring Database

Open the .env file in the project root folder, edit the DATABASE_URL value, setup the database name, username, password.

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://user:password@127.0.0.1:5432/blogdb?serverVersion=13&charset=utf8"

Run the following command to generate a docker compose file template.

$ php bin/console make:docker:database

We change it to the following to start up a Postgres database instance in development stage.

version: "3.5" # specify docker-compose version, v3.5 is compatible with docker 17.12.0+

# Define the services/containers to be run
services:

  postgres:
    image: postgres:${POSTGRES_VERSION:-13}-alpine
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: ${POSTGRES_DB:-blogdb}
      # You should definitely change the password in production
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${POSTGRES_PASSWORD:-password}
      POSTGRES_USER: ${POSTGRES_USER:-user}
    volumes:
      - ./data/blogdb:/var/lib/postgresql/data:rw
      - ./pg-initdb.d:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d

We will use UUID as data type of the primary key, add a script to enable uuid-ossp extension in Postgres when it is starting up.

-- file: pg-initdb.d/ini.sql
SET search_path TO public;
DROP EXTENSION IF EXISTS "uuid-ossp";
CREATE EXTENSION "uuid-ossp" SCHEMA public;

Open config/packages/test/doctrine.yaml, comment out dbname_suffix line.

We use Docker container to bootstrap a database to ensure the application behaviors are same between the development and production.

Starting up Database

Before starting the application, make sure the database is running. Run the following command to start up the Postgres in Docker.

$ docker compose up postgres
$ docker ps -a # to list all containers and make the postgres is running

Now startup the application and make sure there is no exception in the console, that means the database connection is successful.

$ symfony server:start