Advanced Configuration

The configuration of the EntityManager requires a Doctrine\ORM\Configuration instance as well as some database connection parameters. This example shows all the potential steps of configuration.

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<?php
use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;
use Doctrine\ORM\Configuration;
use Doctrine\Common\Proxy\ProxyFactory;

// ...

if ($applicationMode == "development") {
    $cache = new \Doctrine\Common\Cache\ArrayCache;
} else {
    $cache = new \Doctrine\Common\Cache\ApcCache;
}

$config = new Configuration;
$config->setMetadataCacheImpl($cache);
$driverImpl = $config->newDefaultAnnotationDriver('/path/to/lib/MyProject/Entities');
$config->setMetadataDriverImpl($driverImpl);
$config->setQueryCacheImpl($cache);
$config->setProxyDir('/path/to/myproject/lib/MyProject/Proxies');
$config->setProxyNamespace('MyProject\Proxies');
$config->setAutoGenerateProxyClasses($applicationMode === 'development')

if ('development' === $applicationMode) {
    $config->setAutoGenerateProxyClasses(ProxyFactory::AUTOGENERATE_EVAL);
}

$connectionOptions = [
    'driver' => 'pdo_sqlite',
    'path' => 'database.sqlite'
];

$em = EntityManager::create($connectionOptions, $config);
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Configuration Options

The following sections describe all the configuration options available on a Doctrine\ORM\Configuration instance.

Proxy Directory

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<?php
$config->setProxyDir($dir);
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Sets the directory where Doctrine generates any proxy classes. For a detailed explanation on proxy classes and how they are used in Doctrine, refer to the "Proxy Objects" section further down.

Setting the proxy target directory will also implicitly cause a call to Doctrine\ORM\Configuration#setAutoGenerateProxyClasses() with a value of Doctrine\Common\Proxy\ProxyFactory::AUTOGENERATE_FILE_NOT_EXISTS.

Proxy Namespace

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<?php
$config->setProxyNamespace($namespace);
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Sets the namespace to use for generated proxy classes. For a detailed explanation on proxy classes and how they are used in Doctrine, refer to the "Proxy Objects" section further down.

Metadata Driver (REQUIRED)

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<?php
$config->setMetadataDriverImpl($driver);
$config->getMetadataDriverImpl();
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Gets or sets the metadata driver implementation that is used by Doctrine to acquire the object-relational metadata for your classes.

There are currently 4 available implementations:

• Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Driver\AnnotationDriver
• Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Driver\XmlDriver
• Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Driver\DriverChain

Throughout the most part of this manual the AnnotationDriver is used in the examples. For information on the usage of the XmlDriver please refer to the dedicated chapters XML Mapping.

The annotation driver can be configured with a factory method on the Doctrine\ORM\Configuration:

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<?php
$driverImpl = $config->newDefaultAnnotationDriver('/path/to/lib/MyProject/Entities');
$config->setMetadataDriverImpl($driverImpl);
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The path information to the entities is required for the annotation driver, because otherwise mass-operations on all entities through the console could not work correctly. All of metadata drivers accept either a single directory as a string or an array of directories. With this feature a single driver can support multiple directories of Entities.

Metadata Cache (RECOMMENDED)

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$config->setMetadataCacheImpl($cache);
$config->getMetadataCacheImpl();
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Gets or sets the cache implementation to use for caching metadata information, that is, all the information you supply via annotations or xml, so that they do not need to be parsed and loaded from scratch on every single request which is a waste of resources. The cache implementation must implement the Doctrine\Common\Cache\Cache interface.

Usage of a metadata cache is highly recommended.

The recommended implementations for production are:

• Doctrine\Common\Cache\ApcCache
• Doctrine\Common\Cache\ApcuCache
• Doctrine\Common\Cache\MemcacheCache
• Doctrine\Common\Cache\XcacheCache
• Doctrine\Common\Cache\RedisCache

For development you should use the Doctrine\Common\Cache\ArrayCache which only caches data on a per-request basis.

Query Cache (RECOMMENDED)

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$config->setQueryCacheImpl($cache);
$config->getQueryCacheImpl();
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Gets or sets the cache implementation to use for caching DQL queries, that is, the result of a DQL parsing process that includes the final SQL as well as meta information about how to process the SQL result set of a query. Note that the query cache does not affect query results. You do not get stale data. This is a pure optimization cache without any negative side-effects (except some minimal memory usage in your cache).

Usage of a query cache is highly recommended.

The recommended implementations for production are:

• Doctrine\Common\Cache\ApcCache
• Doctrine\Common\Cache\ApcuCache
• Doctrine\Common\Cache\MemcacheCache
• Doctrine\Common\Cache\XcacheCache
• Doctrine\Common\Cache\RedisCache

For development you should use the Doctrine\Common\Cache\ArrayCache which only caches data on a per-request basis.

SQL Logger (Optional)

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$config->setSQLLogger($logger);
$config->getSQLLogger();
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Gets or sets the logger to use for logging all SQL statements executed by Doctrine. The logger class must implement the Doctrine\DBAL\Logging\SQLLogger interface. A simple default implementation that logs to the standard output using echo and var_dump can be found at Doctrine\DBAL\Logging\EchoSQLLogger.

Auto-generating Proxy Classes

Proxy classes can either be generated manually through the Doctrine Console or automatically at runtime by Doctrine. The configuration option that controls this behavior is:

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$config->setAutoGenerateProxyClasses($mode);
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Possible values for $mode are:

• Doctrine\Common\Proxy\ProxyFactory::AUTOGENERATE_FILE_NOT_EXISTS

Generate the proxy class when the proxy file does not exist. This strategy can potentially cause disk access. Note that autoloading will be attempted before falling back to generating a proxy class: if an already existing proxy class is found, then no file write operations will be performed.

• Doctrine\Common\Proxy\ProxyFactory::AUTOGENERATE_EVAL

Generate the proxy classes and evaluate them on the fly via eval(), avoiding writing the proxies to disk. This strategy is only sane for development and long running processes.

• Doctrine\Common\Proxy\ProxyFactory::AUTOGENERATE_NEVER

This flag is deprecated, and is an alias of Doctrine\Common\Proxy\ProxyFactory::AUTOGENERATE_EVAL

• Doctrine\Common\Proxy\ProxyFactory::AUTOGENERATE_ALWAYS

This flag is deprecated, and is an alias of Doctrine\Common\Proxy\ProxyFactory::AUTOGENERATE_FILE_NOT_EXISTS

Before v2.4, setAutoGenerateProxyClasses would accept a boolean value. This is still possible, FALSE being equivalent to AUTOGENERATE_NEVER and TRUE to AUTOGENERATE_ALWAYS.

Manually generating Proxy Classes for performance

While the ORM can generate proxy classes when required, it is suggested to not let this happen for production environments, as it has a major impact on your application's performance.

In a production environment, it is highly recommended to use Doctrine\Common\Proxy\ProxyFactory::AUTOGENERATE_FILE_NOT_EXISTS in combination with a well-configured composer class autoloader<https://getcomposer.org/doc/01-basic-usage.md#autoloading>.

Here is an example of such setup:

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{
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "MyProject\\": "path/to/project/sources/",
            "GeneratedProxies\\": "path/to/generated/proxies/"
        }
    }
}
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You would then configure the ORM to use the "GeneratedProxies" and the "path/to/generated/proxies/" for the proxy classes:

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$config->setProxyDir('path/to/generated/proxies/');
$config->setProxyNamespace('GeneratedProxies');
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To make sure proxies are never generated by Doctrine, you'd forcefully generate them during deployment operations:

$ ./vendor/bin/doctrine orm:generate-proxies
$ composer dump-autoload

Development vs Production Configuration

You should code your Doctrine2 bootstrapping with two different runtime models in mind. There are some serious benefits of using APC or Memcache in production. In development however this will frequently give you fatal errors, when you change your entities and the cache still keeps the outdated metadata. That is why we recommend the ArrayCache for development.

Furthermore you should disable the Auto-generating Proxy Classes option in production.

Connection Options

The $connectionOptions passed as the first argument to EntityManager::create() has to be either an array or an instance of Doctrine\DBAL\Connection. If an array is passed it is directly passed along to the DBAL Factory Doctrine\DBAL\DriverManager::getConnection(). The DBAL configuration is explained in the DBAL section.

Proxy Objects

A proxy object is an object that is put in place or used instead of the "real" object. A proxy object can add behavior to the object being proxied without that object being aware of it. In Doctrine 2, proxy objects are used to realize several features but mainly for transparent lazy-loading.

Proxy objects with their lazy-loading facilities help to keep the subset of objects that are already in memory connected to the rest of the objects. This is an essential property as without it there would always be fragile partial objects at the outer edges of your object graph.

Doctrine 2 implements a variant of the proxy pattern where it generates classes that extend your entity classes and adds lazy-loading capabilities to them. Doctrine can then give you an instance of such a proxy class whenever you request an object of the class being proxied. This happens in two situations:

Reference Proxies

The method EntityManager#getReference($entityName, $identifier) lets you obtain a reference to an entity for which the identifier is known, without loading that entity from the database. This is useful, for example, as a performance enhancement, when you want to establish an association to an entity for which you have the identifier. You could simply do this:

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// $em instanceof EntityManager, $cart instanceof MyProject\Model\Cart
// $itemId comes from somewhere, probably a request parameter
$item = $em->getReference(\MyProject\Model\Item::class, $itemId);
$cart->addItem($item);
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Here, we added an Item to a Cart without loading the Item from the database. If you access any persistent state that isn't yet available in the Item instance, the proxying mechanism would fully initialize the object's state transparently from the database. Here $item is actually an instance of the proxy class that was generated for the Item class but your code does not need to care. In fact it should not care. Proxy objects should be transparent to your code.

Association proxies

The second most important situation where Doctrine uses proxy objects is when querying for objects. Whenever you query for an object that has a single-valued association to another object that is configured LAZY, without joining that association in the same query, Doctrine puts proxy objects in place where normally the associated object would be. Just like other proxies it will transparently initialize itself on first access.

Multiple Metadata Sources

When using different components using Doctrine 2 you may end up with them using two different metadata drivers, for example XML and annotationsL. You can use the DriverChain Metadata implementations to aggregate these drivers based on namespaces:

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<?php
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Driver\DriverChain;

$chain = new DriverChain();
$chain->addDriver($xmlDriver, 'Doctrine\Tests\Models\Company');
$chain->addDriver($annotationDriver, 'Doctrine\Tests\ORM\Mapping');
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Based on the namespace of the entity the loading of entities is delegated to the appropriate driver. The chain semantics come from the fact that the driver loops through all namespaces and matches the entity class name against the namespace using a strpos() === 0 call. This means you need to order the drivers correctly if sub-namespaces use different metadata driver implementations.

Default Repository (OPTIONAL)

Specifies the FQCN of a subclass of the EntityRepository. That will be available for all entities without a custom repository class.

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$config->setDefaultRepositoryClassName($fqcn);
$config->getDefaultRepositoryClassName();
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The default value is Doctrine\ORM\EntityRepository. Any repository class must be a subclass of EntityRepository otherwise you got an ORMException

Setting up the Console

Doctrine uses the Symfony Console component for generating the command line interface. You can take a look at the vendor/bin/doctrine.php script and the Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Console\ConsoleRunner command for inspiration how to setup the cli.

In general the required code looks like this:

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<?php
$cli = new Application('Doctrine Command Line Interface', \Doctrine\ORM\Version::VERSION);
$cli->setCatchExceptions(true);
$cli->setHelperSet($helperSet);
Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Console\ConsoleRunner::addCommands($cli);
$cli->run();
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