Get started with Symfony 6 for beginners — Part 3.1| Database, Doctrine, Entity.

This article will demonstrate how to populate a database with fake data (fake blog information). For this Open up a terminal window and run the following command:

$ composer require --dev orm-fixtures

This command will install the extra library and will create a file App\DataFixtures\AppFixtures

Open that file — src/DataFixtures/AppFixtures.php and let's create a few blog posts.

<?php
namespace App\DataFixtures;
use Doctrine\Bundle\FixturesBundle\Fixture;
use Doctrine\Persistence\ObjectManager;
use App\Entity\Blog;
class AppFixtures extends Fixture
{
public function load(ObjectManager $manager): void
{
for ($i = 1; $i < 6; $i++) {
$blog = new Blog;
$blog->setTitle('Post ' . $i);
$blog->setShortDescription('Short descr for post number ' . $i);
$blog->setBody("Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the
printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been
the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s,
when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled
it to make a type specimen book.");
$manager->persist($blog);
}
$manager->flush();
}
}

As you can see, we made five blog posts. ObjectManager is a doctrine persistence layer. It's an object that we use to manipulate our entities.

In the example above we used persist and flush methods. Persist tells to ObjectManager that we can store this entity state in the database.
And flush flushes all changes to objects and saves them into a database(MySQL in our case).

Run this command to load these new entities into a database:

symfony console doctrine:fixtures:load

Your DB should look like this!

Thanks for reading. Comments/corrections/questions are welcomed.