How to create 100+ Symfony 5+ Doctrine 2 or 3 Repositories

Scroll to the bottom to view a video of this Repository maker in action. I make about 100 Repositories in less than 2 minutes. You can go faster by just hitting enter really fast. LOL

NOTE – repository in the sense of this article means a Doctrine Repository Object. This object is used to interact with the database.

So you need to make a lot of basic Doctrine repositories for your Symfony 5 app? I needed to do the same thing. That is why I created a Doctrine Repository maker for Symfony 5+ or any version that contains the Maker Bundle and uses the src/Repository and src/Entity directory structure.

What happened is I was not very familiar with Doctrine and and the exact syntax it requires for everything in order to work properly. I don’t have the time to learn everything either. I often solve problems by finding the shortest solution time wise.

I know exactly how to design a database, I’ve studied that deeply. But I didn’t feel like wasting time to learn everything about Doctrine ORM just to be able to make queries and use migrations.

Plus I code in so many languages, I don’t have time to learn everything about every ORM… and that is why SQL was invented.

So I have this seriously complex app I am building. It needs several hundred tables. I had well over 100 tables already created via MySQL Workbench. I love workbench because it is a nice UI that makes creating tables and making changes super fast and easy. Much faster than typing all of that mess into an Entity directly.

So what I did is I used Doctrine to reverse engineer my database and create the mapping to the Entity Annotations. That was a pain, but still faster than learning EVERYTHING about Doctrine and typing all that stuff in.

The main problems with reverse engineering with  Doctrine is it doesn’t create the repositories for the entities. And in order to use Doctrine with Symfony you need a Repository for each Entity, especially if you need custom queries/methods.

Another issue I had is if you do reverse engineer your database like this and you do create the repositories, you must then go into each Entity and add the Repository imports.

In order to create the Repositories for my new Entities, I created a maker. The maker gets a list of all of the Entities and existing Repositories. It then loops through each of the Entities that does not have a Repository and asks you if you would like to create one.

If you go with the naming path of the Repository maker it can overwrite files so be careful.

I also created an Entity clone maker, which I’ll talk about and share soon. Many of my Database tables were very similar, so I created an Entity cloner which can be used with Doctrine migrations and the Repository Maker to quickly finish building my app.

The Entity cloner also loops through entities and asks if you want to clone it. Very helpful.

Repository Maker in action