Few hours of each weekend I try to spend on developing my Financier app, which is nothing more than my interactive wallet to invest in market stock. It’s really easy command line app, that has two table in database. I have some plans for this application, that is why I’ve decided to implement library to manage database migrations.

I choose Doctrine Migrations that I usually use when I am working with symfony framework. This time, I wanted to use it on application where I don’t use any framework. First time I had to dive into documentation of this library, and it was terrible like diving into the dark ocean.

In this post I will describe how to use Doctrine Migrations without any framework (like Symfony, Laravel, Lumen or Zend), just plain PHP. Don’t worry, it’s easy, so don’t be scared.

Doctrine Migrations, install it by composer

You need composer. Composer is a naturally choice if you want to use any PHP library. I warn you, you don’t find it in officiation documentation. Fortunately, GitHub exists.

composer require doctrine/migrations

After execution above command, you have to create two files in root of your project. First is migrations.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<doctrine-migrations xmlns="http://doctrine-project.org/schemas/migrations/configuration"
                     xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
                     xsi:schemaLocation="http://doctrine-project.org/schemas/migrations/configuration
                    http://doctrine-project.org/schemas/migrations/configuration.xsd">
 
    <name>Doctrine Sandbox Migrations</name>
 
    <migrations-namespace>DoctrineMigrations</migrations-namespace>
 
    <table name="doctrine_migration_versions" />
 
    <migrations-directory>/app/migrations</migrations-directory>
 
</doctrine-migrations>

You define here:

  • migrations-directory – where you will keep your migrations;
  • migrations-namespace – each migration is a class, so you need to define namespace;

Second file is migrations-db.php, which stores access to database.

<?php
return [
    'dbname' => '',
    'user' => '',
    'password' => '',
    'host' => '',
    'driver' => 'pdo_mysql',
];


If you created correctly both files, you can use ./vendor/bin/doctrine-migrations from your command line. You should see similar to that:

Doctrine Migrations v1.5.0
 
Usage:
  command [options] [arguments]
 
Options:
  -h, --help            Display this help message
  -q, --quiet           Do not output any message
  -V, --version         Display this application version
      --ansi            Force ANSI output
      --no-ansi         Disable ANSI output
  -n, --no-interaction  Do not ask any interactive question
  -v|vv|vvv, --verbose  Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal output, 2 for more verbose output and 3 for debug
 
Available commands:
  help                   Displays help for a command
  list                   Lists commands
 migrations
  migrations:execute     Execute a single migration version up or down manually.
  migrations:generate    Generate a blank migration class.
  migrations:latest      Outputs the latest version number
  migrations:migrate     Execute a migration to a specified version or the latest available version.
  migrations:status      View the status of a set of migrations.
  migrations:up-to-date  Tells you if your schema is up-to-date.
  migrations:version     Manually add and delete migration versions from the version table.