The Symfony Demo Application and MySQL 8

The Symfony Frame work is very popular with PHP developers and it has a very nice Demo Application to help novices learn the intricacies involved. But the demo does not use MySQL. So this blog entry is about re configuring the demo so it works with MySQL 8. And I am using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to you may have to adjust the following commands to work with your operating system.

This is not difficult but there are some steps that are not exactly self evident that this blog will show you how to get the demo working.  

Preliminaries

The first thing to do is to make sure you have PHP 7.2 or better installed including the php7.2-intl (sudo apt-get install php7.2-intl) package as well as the PDO connector. I will admit I have been using PHP since it appeared and this is the first time I have had to install this package.

And you will want Composer to do the behind the scenes lifting for you and Doctrine to map the relations in the PHP code to the database.  Please see my previous blog on getting Doctrine to work with MySQL 8 (Big hint for the TL;DR crowd, set your .env to DATABASE_URL=mysql://account:password@localhost:3306/databasename ).

You will want to create an account on the MySQL server for use with this demo and then make sure it will have the proper rights to use the new schema.

CREATE USER 'demouser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'S3cr3t#'; 

and  

GRANT ALL on 'databasename'.* to 'demouser'@'localhost'; 

The Demo

Now we can start work on the demo itself. 

The first thing to do in a terminal window is type composer create-project symfony/symfony-demo.  Composer will get the demo code ready for you.  Now cd cymfony-demo.   

Change the .env file (you may have to copy the .env-dist to .env and edit it) as noted above DATABASE_URL=mysql://demouser:S3c3t#@localhost:3306/databasename 

Now it is time to use Doctrine to build create the database, the schemas, and load the data.

$ php bin/console doctrine:database:create
$ php bin/console doctrine:schema:create
$ php bin/console doctrine:fixtures:load


Finally enter php bin/console server:run to start the demo. You will get a notice about the URL to use to get to the demo via a web browser. Use that URL in your web browser to get to the actual demo and below you can see that URL is http://127.0.0.1:8000. 

Running the Symfony Demo Application. Note that the 
application is listening on http:127.0.0.1:8000

The Symfony Demo to help you explore this popular PHP Freamwork

Updated: Doctrine and MySQL 8 - An Odd Connection Refused Error

I am currently working my way through the many PHP Frameworks to see how they get on with MySQL 8.  The Frameworks that can take advantage of the MySQL Improved Extension or mysqli can take advantage of the SHA256 Caching Authentication method. But those that are PDO based need to use the older MySQL Native Authentication method.

I wanted to check the PDO based frameworks and today I just happened to be wearing the very nice Symfony shirt I received as part of my presentation at Symfony USA.  So I started with a fresh install of Symfony.  All was going well until it came time to get it to work with MySQL 8 through Doctrine.

Doctrine

Symfony uses Doctrine as an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) and DBAL  (Database Abstraction Layer) as an intermediary to the database.  While I myself am not a big fan of ORMs Doctrine does manage version migration very nicely.  When I tried to tie the frame work and the database together I received a stern connection refused error.

So I double checked the database connection parameters, making sure that I could get to where I wanted using the old MySQL shell.  Yes, the account to be used is identified by the native passwords and I had spelled the account name correctly. Then I double checked for fat-fingering on my part on the .env file where the connection details are stored. Then I did some searching and found someone else had stumbled onto the answer.

What does not work:
DATABASE_URL=mysql://account:password@127.0.0.1:3306/databasename

What does work:
DATABASE_URL=mysql://account:password@localhost:3306/databasename

So a simple s/127.0.0.1/hostname/ got things going.  I double checked the /etc/hosts file to make sure that alias was there (it was).


From then on I was able to create a table with VARCHAR and JSON columns and go about my merry way.

Update: An Oracle MySQL Engineer who works with the PHP connectors informed me that libmysql and all derived clients interpret "localhost" to mean "don't use TCP/ip, but Unix domain socket". And there was a kind post on the Doctrine mailing list informing me that the problems was upstream from Doctrine. Thanks to all who responded to solve this mystery for me.