Doctrine 2 Tutorial: Installation and Configuration

In this tutorial, we will look at how to install Doctrine2 in your PHP project.

This post will make use of Doctrine2's Composer tool.

Installation

First, create a directory for your project.

 mkdir zainabed   

 cd zainabed

Now, create a composer.json file.

vi composer.json

Then, add the following repository information to it.

{
    "require": {
        "doctrine/orm": "*"
    }
}

You are now ready to use Composer to install Doctrine, but first you must install Composer on your machine.

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

To install Doctrine2, run the following command.

php composer.phar install

Note: Composer generates a "autoload.php" file to help in the autoloading of all PHP classes in the Doctrine2 ORM project.

Configuration

First, create a configuration file, configuration.php for Doctrine2 and include autoload.php inside it.

<?php

// configuration.php

// Include Composer Autoload 
require_once "vendor/autoload.php";

Then, create the database configuration details, like database name, username and password.

// database configuration

$databaseParams = array(
    'driver'   => 'pdo_mysql',
    'user'     => 'root',
    'password' => '',
    'dbname'   => 'zainabed',
);

Now, specify the entity path where you want all ORM entities to be stored.

//entity path
$entityPath = array("src/Entity");

Create an Entity Manager 

ORM's fundamental source is the Entity Manager, which manages interactions between entities and databases.

//annotation configuration
$config = Setup::createAnnotationMetadataConfiguration($entityPath, false);

//entity manager object
$entityManager = EntityManager::create($databaseParams, $config);

Finally, you are ready to use Doctrine2 within your PHP project.

The following is a complete configuration example that includes XML and YAML configuration.

<?php

// configuration.php

// Include Composer Autoload 
require_once "vendor/autoload.php";

use Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Setup;
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;

// database configuration
$databaseParams = array(
    'driver'   => 'pdo_mysql',
    'user'     => 'root',
    'password' => '',
    'dbname'   => 'zainabed',
);

//entity path
$entityPath = array("src/Entity");


//annotation configuration
$config = Setup::createAnnotationMetadataConfiguration($entityPath, false);

//entity manager object
$entityManager = EntityManager::create($databaseParams, $config);

//xml configuration
//$xmlEntituPath = array("/path/to/xml-mappings");
//$config = Setup::createXMLMetadataConfiguration($xmlEntituPath, false);
//$entityManager = EntityManager::create($databaseParams, $config);

//yml configuration
//$ymlEntityPath = array("/path/to/yml-mappings");
//$config = Setup::createYAMLMetadataConfiguration($ymlEntityPath, false);
//$entityManager = EntityManager::create($databaseParams, $config);

Doctrine 2 is now configured and ready to use.