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Symfony MongoDB Integration

On this page

  • Overview
  • Why Use MongoDB in a Symfony Application?
  • Quick Start
  • Prerequisites
  • Create a MongoDB Atlas Cluster
  • Install MongoDB Extension
  • Initialize a Symfony Project
  • Install PHP Driver and Doctrine ODM
  • Install Frontend Dependency
  • Modify Project Files
  • Start your Symfony Application
  • Resources

In this guide, you can learn about the Symfony MongoDB integration and how to use this framework to build a simple PHP web application. You can read about the benefits of using Symfony to build web applications with MongoDB as your database and practice using libraries that simplify querying MongoDB.

Symfony is a flexible and highly configurable framework for building PHP applications. You can use this framework to create reusable components to streamline your web app.

The Quick Start section of this guide contains a tutorial which you can follow to build a single page app that accesses data from a MongoDB collection.

The Resources section contains links to resources and documentation for further learning.

By using MongoDB as a data store in a Symfony web application, you can leverage the document data model to build rich query expressions, allowing you to easily interact with data. You can also customize your connections to persist and access data to and from multiple databases and collections.

In your applications, you can implement the Doctrine MongoDB ODM, which is an Object-Document Mapper (ODM) for MongoDB and PHP. It provides a way to work with MongoDB in Symfony, using the same principles as Doctrine ORM for relational databases.

Doctrine ODM allows you to map PHP objects to MongoDB documents and query MongoDB by using a builder API. This mapping enables you to use other MongoDB features such as flexible schema design and advanced searches. To learn more about this library, see the Resources section.

This tutorial shows you how to build a web application by using Symfony, a PHP framework. It includes instructions on connecting to a MongoDB cluster hosted on MongoDB Atlas and accessing and displaying data from your database.

By using MongoDB as a data store in a Symfony web application, you can leverage the document data model to build rich query expressions, allowing you to easily interact with data.

Tip

If you prefer to connect to MongoDB by using the MongoDB PHP Library without Symfony, see Connecting to MongoDB in the MongoDB PHP Library documentation.

MongoDB Atlas is a fully managed cloud database service that hosts your MongoDB deployments. You can create your own free (no credit card required) MongoDB Atlas deployment by following the steps in this guide.

This guide uses Doctrine ODM to allow you to map PHP objects to MongoDB documents and query MongoDB by using a builder API.

Follow the steps in this guide to create a sample Symfony web application that connects to a MongoDB deployment and performs a query on the database.

To create the Quick Start application, you need the following software installed in your development environment:

You must create a MongoDB cluster where you can store and manage your data. Complete the Get Started with Atlas guide to set up a new Atlas account and create a free tier MongoDB cluster. This tutorial also demonstrates how to load sample datasets into your cluster, including the data that is used in this tutorial.

You provide instructions to the driver on where and how to connect to your MongoDB cluster by providing it with a connection string. To retrieve your connection string, follow the instructions in the Connect to Your Cluster tutorial in the Atlas documentation.

Tip

Save your connection string in a secure location.

To learn more about installing the MongoDB extension, see Installing the Extension in the PHP Library Manual.

Run the following command to create a skeleton Symfony project called restaurants:

composer create-project symfony/skeleton restaurants

Enter your project directory, then add the MongoDB PHP driver and the Doctrine ODM bundle to your application. The bundle integrates the ODM library into Symfony so that you can read from and write objects to MongoDB. Installing the bundle also automatically adds the driver to your project. To learn more, see the Resources section of this guide.

Run the following commands to install the ODM:

composer require doctrine/mongodb-odm-bundle

Tip

After running the preceding commands, you might see the following prompt:

Do you want to execute this recipe?

Select yes from the response options to add the ODM library to your application.

To ensure that Doctrine ODM is enabled in your project, verify that your config/bundles.php file contains the highlighted entry in the following code:

config/bundles.php
return [
// ...
Doctrine\Bundle\MongoDBBundle\DoctrineMongoDBBundle::class => ['all' => true],
];

In the config/packages directory, replace the contents of your doctrine_mongodb.yaml file with the following code:

config/packages/doctrine_mongodb.yaml
doctrine_mongodb:
auto_generate_proxy_classes: true
auto_generate_hydrator_classes: true
connections:
default:
server: "%env(resolve:MONGODB_URL)%"
default_database: "%env(resolve:MONGODB_DB)%"
document_managers:
default:
auto_mapping: true
mappings:
App:
dir: "%kernel.project_dir%/src/Document"
mapping: true
type: attribute
prefix: 'App\Document'
is_bundle: false
alias: App

This project uses twig, the default template engine for Symfony, to generate templates in this application. Run the following command to install the twig bundle:

composer require symfony/twig-bundle

Note

This step might result in an error message about unset environment variables, but this issue is resolved in the following steps.

This section demonstrates how to modify the files in your restaurants project to create a Symfony web application that displays restaurants that match the specified criteria.

In the root directory, navigate to the .env file and define the following environment variables to set your connection string and target database:

.env
...
MONGODB_URL=<your Atlas connection string>
MONGODB_DB=sample_restaurants

To retrieve your connection string, see the Create a MongoDB Atlas Cluster step.

Create the Restaurant.php file in the src/Document directory and paste the following code to create an entity that represents documents in the restaurants collection:

src/Document/Restaurant.php
<?php
declare(strict_types=1);
namespace App\Document;
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\Collection;
use Doctrine\ODM\MongoDB\Mapping\Annotations as ODM;
#[ODM\Document(collection: 'restaurants')]
class Restaurant
{
#[ODM\Id]
public ?string $id = null;
#[ODM\Field]
public string $name;
#[ODM\Field]
public string $borough;
#[ODM\Field]
public string $cuisine;
}

Next, create the RestaurantController.php file in the src/Controller directory and paste the following code to handle the endpoints in your application:

src/Controller/RestaurantController.php
<?php
declare(strict_types=1);
namespace App\Controller;
use App\Document\Restaurant;
use Doctrine\ODM\MongoDB\DocumentManager;
use MongoDB\BSON\Regex;
use Psr\Log\LoggerInterface;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\AbstractController;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Annotation\Route;
class RestaurantController extends AbstractController
{
private DocumentManager $dm;
private LoggerInterface $logger;
public function __construct(DocumentManager $dm, LoggerInterface $logger)
{
$this->dm = $dm;
$this->logger = $logger;
}
#[Route('/', name: 'restaurant_index', methods: ['GET'])]
public function index(Request $request): Response
{
return $this->render('restaurant/index.html.twig');
}
#[Route('/restaurant/browse', name: 'restaurant_browse', methods: ['GET'])]
public function browse(Request $request): Response
{
$restaurantRepository = $this->dm->getRepository(Restaurant::class);
$queryBuilder = $restaurantRepository->createQueryBuilder();
$restaurants = $queryBuilder
->field('borough')->equals('Queens')
->field('name')->equals(new Regex('Moon', 'i'))
->getQuery()
->execute();
return $this->render('restaurant/browse.html.twig', ['restaurants' => $restaurants]);
}
}

The controller file defines the index() method, which displays text on the web app's front page. The file also defines the browse() method, which finds documents in which the borough field is 'Queens' and the name field contains the string 'Moon'. This method then displays the documents at the /restaurant/browse/ route. The browse() method uses the QueryBuilder class to construct the query.

Next, create templates to customize the web app's appearance.

Create the templates/restaurant directory and populate it with the following files:

  • index.html.twig

  • browse.html.twig

Paste the following code into the index.html.twig file:

templates/restaurant/index.html.twig
{# templates/restaurant/index.html.twig #}
{% extends 'base.html.twig' %}
{% block body %}
<h1>Welcome to the Symfony MongoDB Quickstart!</h1>
{% endblock %}

Paste the following code into the browse.html.twig file:

templates/restaurant/browse.html.twig
{# templates/restaurant/browse.html.twig #}
{% extends 'base.html.twig' %}
{% block title %}
Search Restaurants
{% endblock %}
{% block body %}
<h1>Search Restaurants</h1>
{% for restaurant in restaurants %}
<p>
<span style="color:deeppink;"><b>Name: </b>{{ restaurant.name }}</span><br>
<b>Borough:</b> {{ restaurant.borough }}<br>
<b>Cuisine:</b> {{ restaurant.cuisine }}<br>
</p>
{% endfor %}
{% endblock %}

Run the following command from the application root directory to start your PHP built-in web server:

symfony server:start

After the server starts, it outputs the following message:

[OK] Web server listening
The Web server is using PHP FPM 8.3.4
http://127.0.0.1:8000

Open the URL http://127.0.0.1:8000/restaurant/browse in your web browser. The page shows a list of restaurants and details about each of them, as displayed in the following screenshot:

Restaurants web app screenshot

Congratulations on completing the Quick Start tutorial!

After you complete these steps, you have a Symfony web application that connects to your MongoDB deployment, runs a query on the sample data, and renders a retrieved result.

Learn more about Symfony and MongoDB by viewing the following resources:

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