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  4. Doctrine Configuration Reference (DoctrineBundle)
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Table of Contents

  • Doctrine DBAL Configuration
  • Doctrine ORM Configuration
    • Shortened Configuration Syntax
    • Caching Drivers
    • Mapping Configuration
    • Custom Mapping Entities in a Bundle
    • Mapping Entities Outside of a Bundle

Doctrine Configuration Reference (DoctrineBundle)

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Warning: You are browsing the documentation for Symfony 4.4, which is no longer maintained.

Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 6.2 (the current stable version).

Doctrine Configuration Reference (DoctrineBundle)

The DoctrineBundle integrates both the DBAL and ORM Doctrine projects in Symfony applications. All these options are configured under the doctrine key in your application configuration.

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# displays the default config values defined by Symfony
$ php bin/console config:dump-reference doctrine

# displays the actual config values used by your application
$ php bin/console debug:config doctrine

Note

When using XML, you must use the http://symfony.com/schema/dic/doctrine namespace and the related XSD schema is available at: https://symfony.com/schema/dic/doctrine/doctrine-1.0.xsd

Doctrine DBAL Configuration

DoctrineBundle supports all parameters that default Doctrine drivers accept, converted to the XML or YAML naming standards that Symfony enforces. See the Doctrine DBAL documentation for more information. The following block shows all possible configuration keys:

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doctrine:
    dbal:
        dbname:               database
        host:                 localhost
        port:                 1234
        user:                 user
        password:             secret
        driver:               pdo_mysql
        # if the url option is specified, it will override the above config
        url:                  mysql://db_user:db_password@127.0.0.1:3306/db_name
        # the DBAL driverClass option
        driver_class:         App\DBAL\MyDatabaseDriver
        # the DBAL driverOptions option
        options:
            foo: bar
        path:                 '%kernel.project_dir%/var/data/data.sqlite'
        memory:               true
        unix_socket:          /tmp/mysql.sock
        # the DBAL wrapperClass option
        wrapper_class:        App\DBAL\MyConnectionWrapper
        charset:              UTF8
        logging:              '%kernel.debug%'
        platform_service:     App\DBAL\MyDatabasePlatformService
        server_version:       '5.7'
        mapping_types:
            enum: string
        types:
            custom: App\DBAL\MyCustomType
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:doctrine="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/doctrine"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services
        https://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd
        http://symfony.com/schema/dic/doctrine
        https://symfony.com/schema/dic/doctrine/doctrine-1.0.xsd">

    <doctrine:config>
        <doctrine:dbal
            name="default"
            dbname="database"
            host="localhost"
            port="1234"
            user="user"
            password="secret"
            driver="pdo_mysql"
            driver-class="App\DBAL\MyDatabaseDriver"
            path="%kernel.project_dir%/var/data/data.sqlite"
            memory="true"
            unix-socket="/tmp/mysql.sock"
            wrapper-class="App\DBAL\MyConnectionWrapper"
            charset="UTF8"
            logging="%kernel.debug%"
            platform-service="App\DBAL\MyDatabasePlatformService"
            server-version="5.7">

            <doctrine:option key="foo">bar</doctrine:option>
            <doctrine:mapping-type name="enum">string</doctrine:mapping-type>
            <doctrine:type name="custom">App\DBAL\MyCustomType</doctrine:type>
        </doctrine:dbal>
    </doctrine:config>
</container>

Note

The server_version option was added in Doctrine DBAL 2.5, which is used by DoctrineBundle 1.3. The value of this option should match your database server version (use postgres -V or psql -V command to find your PostgreSQL version and mysql -V to get your MySQL version).

If you are running a MariaDB database, you must prefix the server_version value with mariadb- (e.g. server_version: mariadb-10.4.14).

Always wrap the server version number with quotes to parse it as a string instead of a float number. Otherwise, the floating-point representation issues can make your version be considered a different number (e.g. 5.7 will be rounded as 5.6999999999999996447286321199499070644378662109375).

If you don't define this option and you haven't created your database yet, you may get PDOException errors because Doctrine will try to guess the database server version automatically and none is available.

If you want to configure multiple connections in YAML, put them under the connections key and give them a unique name:

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doctrine:
    dbal:
        default_connection:       default
        connections:
            default:
                dbname:           Symfony
                user:             root
                password:         null
                host:             localhost
                server_version:   '5.6'
            customer:
                dbname:           customer
                user:             root
                password:         null
                host:             localhost
                server_version:   '5.7'

The database_connection service always refers to the default connection, which is the first one defined or the one configured via the default_connection parameter.

Each connection is also accessible via the doctrine.dbal.[name]_connection service where [name] is the name of the connection. In a controller extending AbstractController, you can access it directly using the getConnection() method and the name of the connection:

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$connection = $this->getDoctrine()->getConnection('customer');

$result = $connection->fetchAll('SELECT name FROM customer');

Doctrine ORM Configuration

This following configuration example shows all the configuration defaults that the ORM resolves to:

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doctrine:
    orm:
        auto_mapping: true
        # the standard distribution overrides this to be true in debug, false otherwise
        auto_generate_proxy_classes: false
        proxy_namespace: Proxies
        proxy_dir: '%kernel.cache_dir%/doctrine/orm/Proxies'
        default_entity_manager: default
        metadata_cache_driver: array
        query_cache_driver: array
        result_cache_driver: array
        naming_strategy: doctrine.orm.naming_strategy.default

There are lots of other configuration options that you can use to overwrite certain classes, but those are for very advanced use-cases only.

Shortened Configuration Syntax

When you are only using one entity manager, all config options available can be placed directly under doctrine.orm config level.

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doctrine:
    orm:
        # ...
        query_cache_driver:
            # ...
        metadata_cache_driver:
            # ...
        result_cache_driver:
            # ...
        connection: ~
        class_metadata_factory_name:  Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\ClassMetadataFactory
        default_repository_class:  Doctrine\ORM\EntityRepository
        auto_mapping: false
        naming_strategy: doctrine.orm.naming_strategy.default
        hydrators:
            # ...
        mappings:
            # ...
        dql:
            # ...
        filters:
            # ...

This shortened version is commonly used in other documentation sections. Keep in mind that you can't use both syntaxes at the same time.

Caching Drivers

4.4

All the Doctrine caching types are deprecated since Symfony 4.4 and won't be available in Symfony 5.0 and higher. Replace them with either type: service or type: pool and use any of the cache pools/services defined with Symfony Cache.

The built-in types of caching drivers are: array, apc, apcu, memcache, memcached, redis, wincache, zenddata and xcache. There is a special type called service which lets you define the ID of your own caching service.

The following example shows an overview of the caching configurations:

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doctrine:
    orm:
        auto_mapping: true
        # each caching driver type defines its own config options
        metadata_cache_driver: apc
        result_cache_driver:
            type: memcache
            host: localhost
            port: 11211
            instance_class: Memcache
        # the 'service' type requires to define the 'id' option too
        query_cache_driver:
            type: service
            id: App\ORM\MyCacheService

Mapping Configuration

Explicit definition of all the mapped entities is the only necessary configuration for the ORM and there are several configuration options that you can control. The following configuration options exist for a mapping:

type

One of annotation (the default value), xml, yml, php or staticphp. This specifies which type of metadata type your mapping uses.

dir

Absolute path to the mapping or entity files (depending on the driver).

prefix

A common namespace prefix that all entities of this mapping share. This prefix should never conflict with prefixes of other defined mappings otherwise some of your entities cannot be found by Doctrine.

alias

Doctrine offers a way to alias entity namespaces to simpler, shorter names to be used in DQL queries or for Repository access.

is_bundle

This option is false by default and it's considered a legacy option. It was only useful in previous Symfony versions, when it was recommended to use bundles to organize the application code.

Custom Mapping Entities in a Bundle

Doctrine's auto_mapping feature loads annotation configuration from the Entity/ directory of each bundle and looks for other formats (e.g. YAML, XML) in the Resources/config/doctrine directory.

If you store metadata somewhere else in your bundle, you can define your own mappings, where you tell Doctrine exactly where to look, along with some other configurations.

If you're using the auto_mapping configuration, you just need to overwrite the configurations you want. In this case it's important that the key of the mapping configurations corresponds to the name of the bundle.

For example, suppose you decide to store your XML configuration for AppBundle entities in the @AppBundle/SomeResources/config/doctrine directory instead:

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doctrine:
    # ...
    orm:
        # ...
        auto_mapping: true
        mappings:
            # ...
            AppBundle:
                type: xml
                dir: SomeResources/config/doctrine
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:doctrine="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/doctrine"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services
        https://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd">

    <doctrine:config>
        <doctrine:orm auto-mapping="true">
            <mapping name="AppBundle" dir="SomeResources/config/doctrine" type="xml"/>
        </doctrine:orm>
    </doctrine:config>
</container>
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$container->loadFromExtension('doctrine', [
    'orm' => [
        'auto_mapping' => true,
        'mappings' => [
            'AppBundle' => ['dir' => 'SomeResources/config/doctrine', 'type' => 'xml'],
        ],
    ],
]);

Mapping Entities Outside of a Bundle

For example, the following looks for entity classes in the Entity namespace in the src/Entity directory and gives them an App alias (so you can say things like App:Post):

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doctrine:
        # ...
        orm:
            # ...
            mappings:
                # ...
                SomeEntityNamespace:
                    type: annotation
                    dir: '%kernel.project_dir%/src/Entity'
                    is_bundle: false
                    prefix: App\Entity
                    alias: App
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:doctrine="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/doctrine"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services
        https://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd">

    <doctrine:config>
        <doctrine:orm>
            <mapping name="SomeEntityNamespace"
                type="annotation"
                dir="%kernel.project_dir%/src/Entity"
                is-bundle="false"
                prefix="App\Entity"
                alias="App"
            />
        </doctrine:orm>
    </doctrine:config>
</container>
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$container->loadFromExtension('doctrine', [
    'orm' => [
        'auto_mapping' => true,
        'mappings' => [
            'SomeEntityNamespace' => [
                'type'      => 'annotation',
                'dir'       => '%kernel.project_dir%/src/Entity',
                'is_bundle' => false,
                'prefix'    => 'App\Entity',
                'alias'     => 'App',
            ],
        ],
    ],
]);

Detecting a Mapping Configuration Format

If the type on the bundle configuration isn't set, the DoctrineBundle will try to detect the correct mapping configuration format for the bundle.

DoctrineBundle will look for files matching *.orm.[FORMAT] (e.g. Post.orm.yaml) in the configured dir of your mapping (if you're mapping a bundle, then dir is relative to the bundle's directory).

The bundle looks for (in this order) XML, YAML and PHP files. Using the auto_mapping feature, every bundle can have only one configuration format. The bundle will stop as soon as it locates one.

If it wasn't possible to determine a configuration format for a bundle, the DoctrineBundle will check if there is an Entity folder in the bundle's root directory. If the folder exist, Doctrine will fall back to using an annotation driver.

Default Value of Dir

If dir is not specified, then its default value depends on which configuration driver is being used. For drivers that rely on the PHP files (annotation, staticphp) it will be [Bundle]/Entity. For drivers that are using configuration files (XML, YAML, ...) it will be [Bundle]/Resources/config/doctrine.

If the dir configuration is set and the is_bundle configuration is true, the DoctrineBundle will prefix the dir configuration with the path of the bundle.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
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