Opening New Connections

Opening a new database connection in Doctrine is very easy. If you wish to use PDO you can just initialize a new PDO object.

Remember our bootstrap.php file we created in the Getting Started chapter? Under the code where we registered the Doctrine autoloader we are going to instantiate our new connection:

// bootstrap.php

// ...
$dsn = 'mysql:dbname=testdb;host=127.0.0.1';
$user = 'dbuser';
$password = 'dbpass';

$dbh = new PDO($dsn, $user, $password);
$conn = Doctrine_Manager::connection($dbh);

Directly passing a PDO instance to Doctrine_Manager::connection() will not allow Doctrine to be aware of the username and password for the connection, since their is no way to retrieve it from an existing PDO instance. The username and password is required in order for Doctrine to be able to create and drop databases. To get around this you can manually set the username and password option directly on the $conn object.

// bootstrap.php

// ...
$conn->setOption('username', $user);
$conn->setOption('password', $password);