Add a column to an existing entity in Symfony

Question

I've been playing around with Symfony on my web server and I've been creating entity with doctrine for my database. I wanted to add a column to one of these entity... I wanted to do something like:

php app/console doctrine:modify:entity

Now I know that this command doesn't exists, but is there a way (without doing a whole migration) to simply add a column.

P.S. I know I could open the php file and textually add the column there and then update the schema, but I'm distributing this to some clients and I like a more "command-line-like" approach.

Answer 1

Actually, using Doctrine does not make sense at all to do something like you suggested.

Doctrine is a ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool. It means that you want to abstract the database from your PHP code, you delegate database stuff to Doctrine. Doctrine does a wonderful job on that area.

As you want to keep your customers/peers updated with the latest version of the model, you should use the Doctrine Migrations ( http://symfony.com/doc/current/bundles/DoctrineMigrationsBundle/index.html ). That's the way to manage database updates. Moreover, it gives you complete control on what to do when upgrading/downgrading the database. You could, e.g., set default values before you add the FK.

The steps for adding a new property on the class should be:

For Symfony 2:

• modify the class by:

  • Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Customer and add the property you want;

    Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Customer

  • or modify the doctrine file:

    Acme/MyBundle/Resources/config/doctrine/customer.yml

• run the console command (it will add the proper set/get in the class)

  php app/console doctrine:generate:entities AcmeMyBundle:Customer

• run the console command

  php app/console doctrine:migrations:diff

• run the console command (it will place a new file on app/DoctrineMigrations)

  php app/console doctrine:migrations:migrate

When you're deploying the new version of the code, all you got to do is update the source code and run the command above.

For Symfony 3:

• modify the class by:

  • Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Customer and add the property you want;

    Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Customer

  • or modify the doctrine file:

    Acme/MyBundle/Resources/config/doctrine/customer.yml

• run the console command (it will add the proper set/get in the class)

  php bin/console doctrine:generate:entities AcmeMyBundle:Customer

• run the console command (update database)

  php bin/console doctrine:schema:update --force