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If you want to use migrations in your symfony projects you have two options to do so. You can either use migrations right fromt the start of your project or you can create migrations from your existing model files or an already existing database.

Starting on a new project

When starting on a fresh project you first need to create the database you want to use for your project. This is can easily be done by letting Doctrine build it.

 
symfony doctrine:build-db
 

Now that the database is ready you need to create a database schema in your config/doctrine/schema.yml file. You could for example create a small table to save blog posts in your database.

 
BlogPost:
  actAs:
    Timestampable: ~
  columns:
    title: string(255)
    body: clob
 

After you created the tables in your schema.yml file you need to need to generate a first version of your model files so that doctrine can generate your first migrations for you. Since symfony 1.3 you can use the doctrine:build task to do this.

 
symfony doctrine:build --all-classes
 

So now you have your models set up but your still lacking the tables in the databases. Because you don't always want to use doctrine:build-all everytime your schema.yml file changes you use the doctrine:generate-migrations-model task to generate your first migrations for the database.

 
symfony doctrine:generate-migrations-model
 

Until now you just created the migrations for your database but the tables are still missing in your database. To finally migrate the changes in your database you have to use the following task.

 
symfony doctrine:migrate
 

After using it you will see that your database is now up to date and is ready to be used.

Starting with an existing database

If you already have an existing database you can still start using migrations in your project. By using the doctrine:generate-migrations-db task Doctrine will check your database for all tables and create migrations for it.

 
symfony doctrine:generate-migrations-db
 

After generating the migrations from your database you need to drop and rebuild it so that doctrine can start to use migration versions in it.

If you have import data in your database you will still have to dump and reload it after you set up migrations!

 
symfony doctrine:drop-db
symfony doctrine:build-db
 

Now that your database is set up again you initialize the migrations by using the doctrine:build task.

 
symfony doctrine:build --all-classes --and-migrate
 

Starting with an existing model

If you want to start using migrations and you already have an existing schema file and generated model files you are free to use the doctrine:generate-migrations-db or doctrine:generate-migrations-model tasks. However I prefer for no particular reason using the doctrine:-generate-migration-model task. So, start using migrations looks very similar to the way which is already described in the last section.

Use the doctrine:generate-migrations-model task to generate your initial migrations.

 
symfony doctrine:generate-migrations-db
 

Drop and re-build the database.

 
symfony doctrine:drop-db
symfony doctrine:build-db
 

And migrate your database so that all tables exists again.

 
symfony doctrine:migrate
 

This work by Dennis Benkert is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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