» Installing a Project-local Propel

Installing a Project-local Propel

Installing Propel is often seen as a difficult task. Official installion instructions recommend installing via Pear and say more initial work is requireq to install it manually. I usually advice not to use global Pear installations but install everything per project because it gives you better control and you are able to use different versions of libraries for different project. This article shows you how easy it actually is to have a project-local installation of Propel 1.3.

Prerequisites

• Phing 2.2.x (and, thus, Pear)

Phing is the only exception to my “no pear installations” rule. It can be installed per project but I see Phing as a development tool you can have globally on your development machine.

Suggested Directory Layout

/            project root
  dev/       development-time files (docs, database schemas, code templates etc.)
    db/      database development files (schema.xml, diagrams, docs etc.)
    libs/    development-time libraries
  libs/      runtime libraries (3rd party)

Getting Propel from the SVN

I recommend fetching Propel directly from the SVN repository simply because I see that as the easiest choice and you have full control of which version to pick. Also, should you ever want to upgrade to a newer revision (maybe there is a bugfix that isn’t officially released yet), you can just retrieve it from the repository. Personally I have 3rd party libraries set up as svn:external where possible but we don’t go into that in this article.

Propel is split into two components - generator and runtime libraries and we’ll keep those two appart. So, in your project root execute following SVN commands:

svn export http://svn.phpdb.org/propel/branches/1.3/generator dev/libs/propel

svn export http://svn.phpdb.org/propel/branches/1.3/runtime/classes/propel libs/propel

And that is it. YES, I mean it!

Propel is now ready to be used. You don’t need to set PATH or include_path, you don’t need to copy executables anywhere and you don’t have to modify a single file.

Building a Propel Project

Create your schema.xml, runtime-conf.xml and build.properties files in dev/db. To build your project go to your project root and run

dev/libs/propel/bin/propel-gen dev/db

… and whatch Propel do its magic. Propel creates output files into ´dev/db/build/´

Fine-tuning The Building Process

You can control where Propel puts the output with a few build.properties directives. Here’s an example that probably needs no explanation.

#relative to propel-gen script
propel.output.dir = ../../..
propel.php.dir = ${propel.output.dir}/app/lib/propel
propel.phpconf.dir = ${propel.output.dir}/dev/db/config
propel.sql.dir = ${propel.output.dir}/dev/db/sql

What About Runtime?

Yeah, you got me there - there’s still one thing you need to take care of before everything “just works”.

//propel runtime + path to your om classes
$path = '/my/project/libs' . PATH_SEPARATOR . '/my/project/app/lib/propel';
set_include_path(get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . $path);