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02.

make:docker:database

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Doctrine is installed! Woo! Now we need to make sure a database is running - like MySQL or PostgreSQL - and then update the DATABASE_URL environment variable to point to it.

30 lines | .env
// ... lines 1 - 27
DATABASE_URL=mysql://db_user:db_password@127.0.0.1:3306/db_name?serverVersion=5.7
// ... lines 29 - 30

So: you can absolutely start a database manually: you can download MySQL or PostgreSQL onto your machine and start it. Or you can use Docker, which is what we will do. OooOoooo.

Using Docker?

Now, hold on: if you're nervous about Docker... or you haven't used it much... or you used it and hated it, stay with me! Using Docker is optional for this tutorial, but we're going to use it in a very lightweight way.

The only requirement to get started is that you need to have Docker downloaded and running on your machine. I already have Docker running on my machine for Mac.

Docker is all about creating tiny containers - like a container that holds a MySQL instance and another that holds a PHP installation. Traditionally, when I think of Docker, I think of a full Docker setup: a container for PHP, a container for MySQL and another container for Nginx - all of which communicate to each other. In that situation, you don't have anything installed on your "local" machine except for Docker itself.

That "full Docker" setup is great - and, if you like it, awesome. But it also adds complexity: sharing source code with the containers can make your app super slow - especially on a Mac - and if you need to run a bin/console command, you need to execute that from within a Docker container.

Our Simple Docker Plan

And so, instead, we're going to do something much simpler. First, we are going to have PHP installed on our local machine - I do have PHP installed on my Mac. Then, we're just going to use Docker to launch services like MySQL, Redis or Elasticsearch. Finally, we'll configure our local PHP app to communicate with those containers.

For me, it's kind of the best of both worlds: it makes it super easy to launch services like MySQL... but without the complexity that often comes with Docker.

Hello make:docker:database

Ok, ready? To manage our Docker containers, we need to create a docker-compose.yaml file that describes what we need.

Tip

If you're using the latest version of Symfony Flex, then when you ran composer require orm, it asked you if you wanted Docker configuration. If you answered yes, congrats! You can skip this step because you already have a docker-compose.yml file with a database service inside. Skip ahead to around 4:30 when we run docker-compose up.

That file is pretty simple but... let's cheat! Find your terminal and run:

php bin/console make:docker:database

This command comes from MakerBundle version 1.20... and I love it. A big thanks to community member Jesse Rushlow for contributing this!

Ok: it doesn't see a docker-compose.yaml file, so it's going to create a new one. I'll use MySQL and, for the version - I'll use latest - we'll talk more about that in a few minutes.

And... done! The database service is ready!

Well, in reality, the only thing this command did was create a docker-compose.yaml file: it didn't communicate with Docker or start any containers - it just created this new docker-compose.yaml file.

13 lines | docker-compose.yaml
version: '3.7'
services:
database:
image: 'mysql:latest'
environment:
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: password
ports:
# To allow the host machine to access the ports below, modify the lines below.
# For example, to allow the host to connect to port 3306 on the container, you would change
# "3306" to "3306:3306". Where the first port is exposed to the host and the second is the container port.
# See https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/#ports for more information.
- '3306'

And... it's pretty basic: we have a service called database - that's just an internal name for it - which uses a mysql image at its latest version. And we're setting an environment variable in the container that makes sure the root user password is... password! At the bottom, the ports config means that port 3306 of the container will be exposed to our host machine.

That last part is important: this will make it possible for our PHP code to talk directly to MySQL in that container. This syntax actually means that port 3306 of the container will be exposed to a random port on our host machine. Don't worry: I'll show you exactly what that means.

docker-compose up

So... yay! We have a docker-compose.yaml file! To start all of the containers that are described in it... which is just one - run:

docker-compose up -d

Tip

In newer versions of Docker (v2 and up), compose is a sub-command of docker itself, so use docker compose instead of docker-compose.

The -d means "run as a daemon" - it runs in the background instead of holding onto my terminal.

The first time you run this it will take a bit longer because it needs to download MySQL. But eventually.... yes! With one command, we now have a database running in the background!

So... how do we communicate with it? Next, let's learn a bit more about docker-compose including how to connect to the MySQL instance and shut down the container.