Doctrine ORM and Zend Framework

2009-06-06 08:12:47

This is my notes on integrating the Doctrine ORM with a Zend Framework project that use Zend_Application. This post was largely inspired by the post Integrating Zend Framework and Doctrine. In fact, you can see mine as an updated version of this great post to work in ZF 1.8. Ruben Vermeersch, the author, have stated on his blog that he want to update the post but he don't have the time yet, so this is me trying to help.

This was done on OS X, so the instructions here assume a n*x like environment. You should also be comfortable with Zend Framework 1.8+ and the new Zend_Application. As stated in the ZF quickstart tutorial, you can create a project by running this command from the uncompressed Zend Framework folder:

./bin/zf.sh create project ~/Sites/zfdoctrine

In the newly created directory, which is a complete zf application, create the directories that will be needed by doctrine

cd ~/Sites/zfdoctrine
mkdir doctrine doctrine/migrations doctrine/schema
mkdir doctrine/data doctrine/data/fixtures doctrine/data/sql

Now, put the content of the Doctrine (1.0 or 1.1) lib folder in library. I strongly suggest that you put the ZF library here too. If you manage more that one project, it's very unlikely that you will have time to update all your projects at the same time, which is needed if you use a global include path.

Create the Doctrine configuration in application/configs/application.ini

;doctrine.connection_string = "mysql://root:pwd@localhost/zfdoctrine"
doctrine.connection_string = "sqlite:///" APPLICATION_PATH "/zfdoctrine.db"
doctrine.data_fixtures_path = APPLICATION_PATH "/../doctrine/data/fixtures"
doctrine.models_path = APPLICATION_PATH "/models"
doctrine.migrations_path = APPLICATION_PATH "/../doctrine/migrations"
doctrine.sql_path = APPLICATION_PATH "/../doctrine/data/sql"
doctrine.yaml_schema_path = APPLICATION_PATH "/../doctrine/schema"

Initialize Doctrine in you application by adding this function to application/Bootstrap.php

public function _initDoctrine()
{
    require_once 'Doctrine.php';        
    $loader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();
    $loader->pushAutoloader(array('Doctrine', 'autoload'));
 
    $doctrineConfig = $this->getOption('doctrine');
 
    $manager = Doctrine_Manager::getInstance();
    $manager->setAttribute(
        Doctrine::ATTR_MODEL_LOADING, 
        Doctrine::MODEL_LOADING_CONSERVATIVE);    
 
    // Add models and generated base classes to Doctrine autoloader
    Doctrine::loadModels($doctrineConfig['models_path']);
 
    $manager->openConnection($doctrineConfig['connection_string']);    
 
    return $manager;
}

One of the fun thing about Doctrine is that you have access to a lot of command line tool to create your database, models, sql, schema, etc. Create a new file called doctrine-cli in a scripts folder at the root of you project with the following content:

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
/**
 * Doctrine CLI script
 */
 
define('APPLICATION_ENV', 'development');
 
define('APPLICATION_PATH', realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../application'));
 
set_include_path(implode(PATH_SEPARATOR, array(
    realpath(APPLICATION_PATH . '/../library'),
    get_include_path(),
)));
 
require_once 'Zend/Application.php';
 
// Create application, bootstrap, and run
$application = new Zend_Application(
    APPLICATION_ENV,
    APPLICATION_PATH . '/configs/application.ini'
);
 
$application->getBootstrap()->bootstrap('doctrine');
 
$cli = new Doctrine_Cli($application->getOption('doctrine'));
$cli->run($_SERVER['argv']);

You can make this script executable and try it, to see the list of task that doctrine-cli can do for you

chmod +x ./scripts/doctrine-cli
./scripts/doctrine-cli

Now you can jump back to [Ruben Vermeersch's Tutorial]http://ruben.savanne.be/articles/integrating-zend-framework-and-doctrine) tutorial in the "Building an application" section and create the sample application. You'll learn how to use Doctrine do a simple insert, a query and how to use the command line to create your database and model.

note: If you're using these two projects together, you may be interested in my next post too: ZFDebug and Doctrine ORM

update 2009/10/29: things are getting easier, check out: Doctrine 1.2 is Zend Framework friendly