Meta Data

Because the Entity doesn't extend any smart base class, we will have to tell Doctrine how to map the data from the database into the entity. There're multiple ways of doing this:

Annotations

The annotation driver is set as default meta driver. It searches the entities in the app folder, but you can change this to whatever folder (or multiple folders) you like. Annotations means, that you will use docblocks to indicate the column mappings.

<?php

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping AS ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ORM\Table(name="articles")
 */
class Article
{
    /**
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
     */
    protected $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="string")
     */
    protected $title;

    public function getId()
    {
        return $this->id;
    }

    public function getTitle()
    {
        return $this->title;
    }

    public function setTitle($title)
    {
        $this->title = $title;
    }
}

More about the annotation driver: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.6/reference/annotations-reference.html#annotations-reference

Attributes

The attributes driver requires php 8 or above. It searches the entities in the app folder, but you can change this to whatever folder (or multiple folders) you like. Attributes means, that you will use attributes to indicate the column mappings.

<?php

namespace App\Entities;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Column;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Entity;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\GeneratedValue;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Id;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Table;

#[Entity]
#[Table(name: "articles")]
class Article
{
    #[Id, Column(type: "integer"), GeneratedValue()]
    protected $id;

    #[Column(type: "string")]
    protected $title;

    public function getId()
    {
        return $this->id;
    }

    public function getTitle()
    {
        return $this->title;
    }

    public function setTitle($title)
    {
        $this->title = $title;
    }
}

More about the attributes driver: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.11/reference/attributes-reference.html

YAML

NOTE: The YAML driver is deprecated and will be removed in Doctrine 3.0.

If you prefer Yaml, you can easily switch the meta driver to yaml. It's better to change the meta data paths to something like config_path('mappings') instead of adding them all to the app folder.

# App.Entities.Article.dcm.yml
App\Entities\Article:
  type: entity
  table: articles
  id:
    id:
      type: integer
      generator:
        strategy: AUTO
  fields:
    title:
      type: string

More about the YAML driver: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.6/reference/yaml-mapping.html

XML

Another option is to leverage XML mappings. Just like YAML it's better to change the meta data paths to something like config_path('mappings').

// App.Article.dcm.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<doctrine-mapping xmlns="http://doctrine-project.org/schemas/orm/doctrine-mapping"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://doctrine-project.org/schemas/orm/doctrine-mapping
                          http://raw.github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/master/doctrine-mapping.xsd">

    <entity name="App\Entities\Article" table="articles">

        <id name="id" type="integer" column="id">
            <generator strategy="AUTO"/>
            <sequence-generator sequence-name="tablename_seq" allocation-size="100" initial-value="1" />
        </id>

        <field name="title" column="title" type="string" />
    </entity>

</doctrine-mapping>

More information about XML mappings: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.6/reference/xml-mapping.html

Config files

This package adds another option, which leverages Laravel's config system. In addition to setting meta, this also requires setting mapping_file. You could for example create a config/mappings.php file to provide mapping information. Here is an example of setting the meta and mapping_file config properties inside of config/doctrine.php to use config file-based metadata:

<?php

return [
    'managers' => [
        'default' => [
            'meta'       => env('DOCTRINE_METADATA', 'config'),
            'mapping_file' => 'mappings',

The array structure in config/mappings.php is almost identical to the YAML one:

<?php
return [
    'App\Entities\Article' => [
        'type'   => 'entity',
        'table'  => 'articles',
        'id'     => [
            'id' => [
                'type'     => 'integer',
                'generator' => [
                    'strategy' => 'auto'
                ]
            ],
        ],
        'fields' => [
            'title' => [
                'type' => 'string'
            ]
        ]
    ]
];

Static PHP

When you change the meta data driver setting to static_php, your entities will expect a loadMetadata method.

<?php

class Article
{

    protected $id;
    protected $title;

    public static function loadMetadata(Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\ClassMetadata $metadata)
    {
        $metadata->mapField(array(
           'id'        => true,
           'fieldName' => 'id',
           'type'      => 'integer'
        ));

        $metadata->mapField(array(
           'fieldName' => 'title',
           'type'      => 'string'
        ));
    }
}

More on the StaticPHP driver: https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-orm/en/2.6/reference/php-mapping.html