Installing Propel

• Prerequisites
• Setup
  • Via Composer
  • Via Git
• Propel Directory Structure
• Testing Propel Installation
• Troubleshooting
  • Getting Help

Propel is available as a clone from the official Github repository, as a checkout from Subversion through Github and as a “traditional” tgz or zip package. Whatever installation method you may choose, getting Propel to work is pretty straightforward.

Prerequisites

Propel just requires:

• PHP 7.4 or newer, with the DOM (libxml2) module enabled
• A supported database (MySQL, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle)

Propel also uses some Symfony2 components to work properly:

• Config : uses in the source code to manage and validate configuration.
• Console : which manage the generators propel uses.
• Yaml
• Validator : a way you manage validations with Propel.
• Finder : uses in the source code to manage the files.

TipPropel uses the PDO and SPL components, which are bundled and enabled by default in PHP7.

Setup

Via Composer

We advise you to rely on Composer to manage your projects’ dependencies. If you want to install Propel via Composer, just create a new composer.json file at the root of your project’s directory with the following content:

{
    "require": {
        "propel/propel": "~2.0@beta"
    }
}

Then you have to download Composer itself so in a terminal just type the following:

$ wget http://getcomposer.org/composer.phar
# If you haven't wget on your computer
$ curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Finally, to install all your project’s dependencies, type the following:

$ php composer.phar install

Via Git

If you want, you can also setup Propel using Git cloning the Github repository:

$ git clone git://github.com/propelorm/Propel2 vendor/propel

Propel is well unit-tested so the cloned version should be pretty stable. If you want to update Propel, just go to the repository and pull the remote:

$ cd myproject/vendor/propel
$ git pull

Propel Directory Structure

The root directory of the Propel library includes the following folders:

Testing Propel Installation

The Propel generator component bundles a propel sh script (and a propel.bat script for Windows). This script makes it easy to execute build commands. You can test this component is properly installed by calling the propel script from the CLI:

$ cd myproject
$ vendor/bin/propel

The command should output the Propel version following by a list of the options and the available commands. We will learn to use these commands later.

TipIn order to allow an easier execution of the script, you can also add the propel generator’s bin/ directory to your PATH, or create a symlink. For example:

$ cd myproject
$ ln -s vendor/bin/propel propel

Or simply edit your .bashrc or .zshrc file:

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/vendor/bin/

On Windows you could set the PATH for the opened command with:

set PATH=%PATH%;C:/path/to/vendor/bin/

To globally define the PATH adjust it inside the “Environment Variables”, which you can find in your system advanced settings panel.

At this point, Propel should be setup and ready to use. You can follow the steps in the Build Guide to try it out.

Troubleshooting

Getting Help

If you can’t manage to install Propel, don’t hesitate to ask for help. See Support for details on getting help.

Next: Building a project →