Initialize Database Versioning on an existing project

When joining a ongoing project there are some simple steps you need to follow in order to setup the database versioning workflow on your local machine.

Install Phinx

Joining a project that was prepared for database versioning, you'll find Phinx as a dependency in the Composer manifest file. Following the process of setting up a project, you'll install Phinx automatically when installing all Composer dependencies. As a reminder, you have execute the following statement in your project root on your command line:

composer install

Composer will install Phinx and its dependencies for you and you are good to move on.

Build your database

You should find a schema.sql and a data.sql in the /db folder of the project you recently cloned on your local machine. In order to setup your database, create a new database for you project, and import first schema.sql and then data.sql. Your database fundament is now set.

Initialize Phinx

Use your command line tool, navigate to the project root and execute the following statement

php vendor/bin/phinx init

This comman will create a phinx.yml file in your project root. It is the descriptor file for Phinx holding the neccessary information to work on the databases of different environments

paths:
    migrations: %%PHINX_CONFIG_DIR%%/migrations

environments:
    default_migration_table: phinxlog
    default_database: development
    production:
        adapter: mysql
        host: localhost
        name: production_db
        user: root
        pass: ''
        port: 3306
        charset: utf8

    development:
        adapter: mysql
        host: localhost
        name: development_db
        user: root
        pass: ''
        port: 3306
        charset: utf8

    testing:
        adapter: mysql
        host: localhost
        name: testing_db
        user: root
        pass: ''
        port: 3306
        charset: utf8

Since we want to keep things ordered, first thing you should do is to create a directory called db in your project root and update the migration path of Phinx in the phinx.yml file:

paths:
    migrations: %%PHINX_CONFIG_DIR%%/db/migrations

Now you should update the development environment database credentials in order to start working with the database of your local development environemnt. Working with the Vagrant Box, your configuration might look like this:

development:
    adapter: mysql
    host: 127.0.0.1
    name: versioning-demo
    user: root
    pass: 'root'
    port: 3306
    charset: utf8

Upgrade your database

Depending on how many migrations were written after the last schema.sql and data.sql dumps were created, you probably need to upgrade your database. In order to get an overview of the current state of your database you should first check the status and then perform an upgrade on your database.