Since, I last wrote about using the Doctrine project's Migrations tool independently of Doctrine's ORM, it's now stable and much easier to get going with.
Installation and configuration
As with all good PHP tools, we simply use Composer:
This will install the tool and a script is placed into vendor/bin/doctrine-migrations.
To configure, we need to add two files to the root of our project:
migrations.yml:
This file sets up the default configuration for Migrations. The most important two settings are table_name which is the name of the database table holding the migration information and migrations_directory which is where the migration files will be stored. This directory name may be a relative path (relative to the directory where migrations.yml is stored, that is).
migrations-db.php:
This file is simply the standard DBAL configuration for a database connection. In this case, I'm using SQLite. Again, the path is relative.
Using Migrations
Migrations is a command line tool called doctrine-migrations that has been installed into the vendor/bin/ directory. Running the tool without arguments will give you helpful information:
The two important command are: migrations:generate and migrations:migrate.
Creating a migration
To generate a new migration, we run:
This will create a new file for us in our migrations directory which we then need to fill in. There are two methods class: up() and down() and the rule is that whatever we do in up() must be reversed in down().
For example to create a new table, we code it like this:
If you want to write your schema changes as SQL, then use the $this->addSql() method.
We can also populate the newly created table adding the postUp() method to the class. As its name suggests, the code in the method is execute after the code in up(). In postUp() we access the connection property and then call the appropriate methods. For example:
Alternatively, we could have used executeQuery() and written it as SQL:
Running the migrations
To update the database to the latest migration we run the migrations:migrate command. This will run the up() method on all migration files that haven't already been run. For example:
In this case, I have two migration files in my migrations directory and started with an empty database.
That's it
That's all there is to it. Migrations is very easy to use as a standalone tool and worth considering for your database migrations.