Getting started¶

This document contains a quick introduction on how to get started with some very basic code examples.

Requirements¶

Dogmatist requires PHP 5.5 or higher. Generally for installing it you should be using Composer.

Installing¶

Using Composer¶

To install Dogmatist as a composer dependency of your project, use:

composer require bravesheep/dogmatist=dev-master

To install Dogmatist as a development dependency, which is what you will most likely be using Dogmatist for, you can use this command:

composer require --dev bravesheep/dogmatist=dev-master

Note that this installs the master branch variant of Dogmatist. If you prefer to use a stable release, you can choose to omit the =dev-master part of the command which should ensure that you get the latest stable release.

Cloning from git¶

You can also clone and install the project from git using:

git clone https://github.com/bravesheep/dogmatist.git
cd dogmatist
composer install

Constructing dogmatist¶

In order to work with Dogmatist, you will need an instance of the base Dogmatist generator class. You can either manually construct an instance, or (preferred) use the Factory class provided to create an instance. When you’re using composer, also make sure you have included the autoloader, so all classes get automatically loaded from that point on:

<?php

require "vendor/autoload.php";

$dogmatist = \Bravesheep\Dogmatist\Factory::create();

Note

Future code fragments will omit things like the PHP open tag and require statement. In general $dogmatist will be an instance of Dogmatist created using this factory method.

The Factory::create() method may be provided with an optional set of arguments. Three things can be provided by the programmer:

An instance of Faker\Generator or a string specifying the language of the generator which should be constructed.
An instance of Bravesheep\Dogmatist\Guesser\GuesserInterface. A guesser can be used to automatically determine what should be generated.
An instance of Symfony\Component\PropertyAccess\PropertyAccessorInterface for setting properties. One will be constructed for you if you don’t provide any, however this may be used to provide an already existing instance.

So a Dogmatist instance that would be using French providers, could be constructed using this for example:

$dogmatist = \Bravesheep\Dogmatist\Factory::create('fr_FR');

Now that we have a dogmatist example we can start generating builders and samples from them:

$dogmatist = \Bravesheep\Dogmatist\Factory::create();
$dogmatist
    ->create('object')
        ->fake('name', 'name')
        ->value('count', 1)
        ->relation('address', 'object')
            ->fake('address', 'streetAddress')
            ->fake('city', 'city')
        ->done()
        ->multiple('address', 1, 3)
        ->save('person', 5)
    ->done()
;
$persons = $dogmatist->freshSamples('person', 10);

Now that you’ve seen an example take a look at the rest of the documentation to learn about the interface that Dogmatist provides for generating objects and entities.