Brandon's Blog

I recently started a new project using the Symfony PHP Framework. I’ve used Symfony before and love it. In the past I’ve used Propel, but as Symfony now fully supports Doctrine and Doctrine looks very promising, I decided to give it a shot for my latest project.

Symfony 1.2 currently uses Doctrine 1.0. Doctrine 1.1 was released in March. Symfony 1.3 will support Doctrine 1.1, but won’t be released until November.

Since I’m starting a new project, I wanted to try to use the latest version of Doctrine. I’ll be honest, I don’t have a great reason for doing this other then the pain I went through migrating an old project (with lots of custom model stuff) from Propel 1.2 to Propel 1.3. I understand this is an apples to oranges comparison, however its the only motivation I’ve got. Feel free to stop reading now.

Overall the Symfony developers have made it extremely easy to use Doctrine 1.1 with Symfony 1.2. However, given this is an unsupported configuration, they don’t back-port any patches related to Doctrine 1.1 from the Symfony 1.3 branch to sf 1.2. In this post I will try to catalog the changes and provide a back-port patch you can use to integrate Doctrine 1.1 into your sf 1.2 projects.

Related Postings

Here are some pages/tickets/changesets related to Doctrine 1.1 with Symfony. If I’m missing something, please leave me a comment below and I’ll update this ASAP!

Installing Doctrine 1.1

To get started using Doctrine 1.1, you’ll need to download it. Jonathan Wage provided instructions here which I’ll reproduce below.

From your Symfony project’s root folder:

Now change the location of the Doctrine lib path by editing your ProjectConfiguration::setup() method to look similar to:

public function setup()
{
  sfConfig::set('sfDoctrinePlugin_doctrine_lib_path', sfConfig::get('sf_lib_dir') . '/vendor/doctrine/Doctrine.php');
}

Patch Symfony Library

Now you need to patch the Symfony library with the back-ported changes related to Doctrine from the Symfony 1.3 branch. This patch is very simple, and currently only effects one file.

Navigate to your Symfony lib directory. Depending on how you started your project, this is probably the lib/symfony directory in your project.

Now rebuild your model forms. From your project’s root directory:

Patch sfDoctrineGuardPlugin

If you use the sfDoctrineGuardPlugin you will need to apply another patch.

From your project’s root directory:

Finished!

You should now be able to use Doctrine 1.1 with Symfony 1.2. I haven’t run into any problems using it, however I’ve just gotten started with my new project and haven’t done much of anything yet! If you have troubles let me know.

For anyone on Gentoo, I have a symfony ebuild in my Gentoo Overlay that will install Symfony 1.2 with Doctrine 1.1 support for you.

I’ll try to keep this post updated if I come across anything else that needs to change when using Doctrine 1.1 with Symfony 1.2.

Brandon Web Applications doctrine, symfony