Doctrine and Symfony, setup and usage tutorial

Learn how to implement pagination, relations between entities and insert, fetch (ordering, filtering), update and delete data.

Doctrine is ready to use with Symfony and is the layer between your code and database.

How to install Doctrine

Symfony itself is really barebone, so most components you will have to install yourself.

Luckily, the Symfony developers made it easy since Symfony 4 and you can install most bundles without configuration.

Enter the command:

composer req orm

This is short for composer require doctrine/doctrine-bundle, where orm is an alias for the full bundle name.

The setup

Since we’re using Symfony 4, the configuration is really easy. In the root of your project the command above create a .env file.

In the file look for the line:

DATABASE_URL=mysql://<username>:<password>@<host>:3306/<database>

Replace username, database, and host with your credentials and that your setup is finished.

How does it work?

I’m not going to explain the internals of Doctrine, just some basic principles. Read…