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.

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.

1. Install
2. Basic usage
3. Advanced usage
   1. Enabling databases
   2. Environment specific fixtures
   3. Fixtures parameters
      1. Alice parameters
      2. Application parameters
   4. Use service factories
   5. Load fixtures in a specific order
      1. Load fixtures in a specific order
      2. Persisting the classes in a specific order
4. Custom Faker Providers
5. Custom Alice Processors
6. Resources

With Symfony Flex (recommended):

# If you do not have Doctrine installed yet:
composer require doctrine-orm

composer require --dev hautelook/alice-bundle 

Without Flex you will have to install doctrine/orm and register the bundles accordingly in app/AppKernel.php or wherever your Kernel class is located:

<?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, for example:

# config/packages/dev/hautelook_alice.yaml

hautelook_alice:
    fixtures_path: '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%'

If you are using a non-flex architecture, you may want to use Resources/fixtures instead of fixtures.

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:

• 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

# fixtures/dummy.yaml

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

# fixtures/related_dummy.yaml

App\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

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

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

Other contributors.