AliceBundle

A Symfony bundle to manage fixtures with nelmio/alice and fzaninotto/Faker.

The database support is done in FidryAliceDataFixtures. Check this project to know which database/ORM is supported.

Warning: this is the documentation for HautelookAliceBundle 2.0. If you want to check the documentation for 1.x, head this way.

When to use this bundle?

HautelookAliceBundle changed a lot, it first was acting as a simple bundle for nelmio/alice, it then started to ship some additional features to enrich it.

HautelookAliceBundle 1.x was the first milestone reaching a certain level of maturity in its usage:

Easily load a set of fixtures from a command
Being able to define different sets of fixtures for multiple environments
Customize the data generation with custom Faker providers
Customize the loading behaviour with processors

HautelookAliceBundle 2.x changes a lot, although not so much. In 1.x, a lot of complexity was brought in the bundle due to nelmio/alice 2.x limitations and were at best workarounds (like the lack of handling of circular references). A lot of that complexity has been pushed back to nelmio/alice 3.x which has a much more flexible design. As a result:

nelmio/alice 3.x allows you to easily create PHP objects with random data in an elegant way
FidryAliceDataFixtures is a persistence layer for nelmio/alice 3.x. If you need to persist the loaded objects, it is the package you need. It provides you the flexibility to be able to purge the data between each loadings or wrap the loading in a transaction for your tests for example to simply rollback once the test is finished instead of calling an expansive purge.
hautelook/alice-bundle 2.x is now only focused on the fixture discovery: find the appropriate files and load them. If you need to load specific sets of files for your tests, FidryAliceDataFixtures is enough.

Documentation

Other references:

Knp University screencast

Installation

Example of installation:

# If you are using Symfony standard edition, you can skip this step
composer require doctrine/doctrine-bundle doctrine/orm:^2.5

composer require --dev hautelook/alice-bundle doctrine/data-fixtures

Explanation: HautelookAliceBundle uses FidryAliceDataFixtures for the persistence layer. As FidryAliceDataFixtures is compatible with different databases/ORM, one cannot be installed by default. In the example above, we are using Doctrine ORM which requires doctrine/orm doctrine/orm-bundle doctrine/data-fixtures.

Then, enable the bundle by updating your app/AppKernel.php file to enable the bundle:

<?php
// app/AppKernel.php

public function registerBundles()
{
    $bundles = [
        new Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\FrameworkBundle(),
        // ...
        new Doctrine\Bundle\DoctrineBundle\DoctrineBundle(),
    ];
    
    if (in_array($this->getEnvironment(), ['dev', 'test'])) {
        //...
        $bundles[] = new Nelmio\Alice\Bridge\Symfony\NelmioAliceBundle();
        $bundles[] = new Fidry\AliceDataFixtures\Bridge\Symfony\FidryAliceDataFixturesBundle();
        $bundles[] = new Hautelook\AliceBundle\HautelookAliceBundle();
    }

    return $bundles;
}

Configure the bundle to your needs (example with default values):

# app/config/config_dev.yml

hautelook_alice:
    fixtures_path: 'Resources/fixtures' # Path to which to look for fixtures relative to the project directory or the bundle path.
    root_dirs:
        - '%kernel.root_dir%'
        - '%kernel.project_dir%'

Basic usage

Assuming you are using Doctrine, make sure you have the doctrine/doctrine-bundle and doctrine/data-fixtures packages installed.

Then create a fixture file in one of the following location:

Resources/fixtures if you are using flex
app/Resources/fixtures if you have a non-flex bundle-less Symfony application
src/AppBundle/Resources/fixtures or any bundle under which you want to place the fixtures

# Resources/fixtures/dummy.yml

AppBundle\Entity\Dummy:
    dummy_{1..10}:
        name: <name()>
        related_dummy: '@related_dummy*'

# Resources/fixtures/related_dummy.yml

AppBundle\Entity\RelatedDummy:
    related_dummy_{1..10}:
        name: <name()>

Then simply load your fixtures with the doctrine command php bin/console hautelook:fixtures:load.

If you want to load the fixtures of a bundle only, do php bin/console hautelook:fixtures:load -b MyFirstBundle -b MySecondBundle.

See more.
Next chapter: Advanced usage

Resources

Behat extension: AliceBundleExtension
Bundle for generating AliceBundle compatible fixtures directly from Doctrine entities: AliceGeneratorBundle
Upgrade guide
- Upgrade from 0.X to 1.X
Changelog

Credits

This bundle was originaly developped by Baldur RENSCH and HauteLook. It is now maintained by Théo FIDRY.

Other contributors.

patrik-simunic-cz/AliceBundle