Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, we need a proper CLI installation of PHP 5.4 or superior. We will also use the curl command to download the Composer archive and the SQLite 3 client.

In the examples, we will use the PHP built-in web server and SQLite as DBMS. Doctrine is a pure PHP library. It is compatible with any web server supporting PHP, but is not limited to Apache and Nginx. Of course, it can also be used in applications that are not intended to run on web servers, such as command-line tools. On the database side, SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server are officially supported.

Thanks to the DBAL component, our blog should work fine with all these DBMS. It has been tested with SQLite and MySQL.

The Doctrine project also provides Object Document Mappers (ODM) for NoSQL databases including MongoDB, CouchDB, PHPCR, and OrientDB. These topics are not covered in this book.