Populate Module

This module provides a way to populate a database from YAML fixtures and custom classes. For instance, when a building a web application the pages and default objects can be defined in YAML and shared around developers. This extends the requireDefaultRecords concept in SilverStripe's DataModel.

• Requirements
• Installation Instructions
• Setup
• Configuration options
• YAML Format
  • Updating Records
  • PopulateMergeWhen
  • PopulateMergeMatch
  • PopulateMergeAny
  • Default Assets
• Extensions
  • PopulateMySQLExport
• Publish configuration
• Allow Populate to run on "live" environments

Requirements

• PHP 8.1
• SilverStripe Framework ^5
• SilverStripe Versioned ^2

Installation Instructions

This module must only ever be used in your development environment, and should never be used on production. While there is code to prevent it from being run in production, it is not fool-proof and therefore you must never run this module in production. Install it as a dev dependency in composer like so:

composer require --dev dnadesign/silverstripe-populate

Setup

First create a new yml config file in your config directory app/_config/populate.yml (or add it to an existing config.yml file if you prefer).

DNADesign\Populate\Populate:
  include_yaml_fixtures:
    - 'app/fixtures/populate.yml'

If you're sharing test setup with populate, you can specify any number of paths to load fixtures from.

An example app/fixtures/populate.yml might look like the following:

Page:
  home:
    Title: "Home"
    Content: "My Home Page"
    ParentID: 0
SilverStripe\Security\Member:
  admin:
    ID: 1
    Email: "[email protected]"
    PopulateMergeMatch:
      - 'ID'
      - 'Email'

Out of the box, the records will be created on when you run the PopulateTask through /dev/tasks/PopulateTask/. To make it completely transparent to developers during the application build, you can also include this to hook in on requireDefaultRecords as part of dev/build by including the following in one of your application models requireDefaultRecords methods:

use DNADesign\Populate\Populate;

class Page extends SiteTree
{
    public function requireDefaultRecords()
    {
        parent::requireDefaultRecords();
        Populate::requireRecords();
    }
}

Configuration options

include_yaml_fixtures

An array of YAML files to parse.

mysite/_config/app.yml

DNADesign\Populate\Populate:
  include_yaml_fixtures:
    - 'app/fixtures/populate.yml'

truncate_objects

An array of ClassName's whose instances are to be removed from the database prior to importing. Useful to prevent multiple copies of populated content from being imported. It's recommended to truncate any objects you create, to ensure you can re-run PopulateTask as often as you want during development and get a consistent database state. This supports Versioned objects (like SiteTree) and Fluent (if the module is installed).

DNADesign\Populate\Populate:
  truncate_objects:
    - Page
    - SilverStripe\Assets\Image

truncate_tables

An array of tables to be truncated. Useful when there's no relation between your populated classes and the table you want truncated

DNADesign\Populate\Populate:
  truncate_tables:
    - Image_Special_Table

See Updating Records if you wish to merge new and old records rather than clearing all of them.

YAML Format

Populate uses the same FixtureFactory setup as SilverStripe's unit testing framework. The basic structure of which is:

ClassName:
  somereference:
    FieldName: "Value"

Relations are handled by referring to them by their reference value:

SilverStripe\Security\Member:
    admin:
      Email: "[email protected]"

Page:
  homepage:
    AuthorID: =>SilverStripe\Security\Member.admin

See SilverStripe's fixture documentation for more advanced examples, including $many_many and $many_many_extraFields.

Any object which implements the Versioned extension will be automatically published.

Basic PHP operations can also be included in the YAML file. Any line that is wrapped in a ` character and ends with a semi colon will be evaled in the current scope of the importer.

Page:
  mythankyoupage:
    ThankYouText: "`Page::config()->thank_you_text`;"
    LinkedPage: "`sprintf(\"[Page](%s)\", App\\Page\\HelpPage::get()->first()->Link())`;"

Updating Records

If you do not truncate the entire table, the module will attempt to first look up an existing record and update that existing record. For this to happen the YAML must declare the fields to match in the look up. You can use several options for this.

PopulateMergeWhen

Contains a WHERE clause to match e.g "URLSegment = 'home' AND ParentID = 0".

Mysite\PageTypes\HomePage:
  home:
    Title: "My awesome homepage"
    PopulateMergeWhen: "URLSegment = 'home' AND ParentID = 0"

PopulateMergeMatch

Takes a list of fields defined in the YAML and matches them based on the database to avoid repeating content

Mysite\PageTypes\HomePage:
  home:
    Title: "My awesome homepage"
    URLSegment: 'home'
    ParentID: 0
    PopulateMergeMatch:
      - URLSegment
      - ParentID

PopulateMergeAny

Takes the first record in the database and merges with that. This option is suitable for things like SiteConfig where you normally only contain a single record.

SilverStripe\SiteConfig\SiteConfig:
  mysiteconfig:
    Tagline: "SilverStripe is awesome"
    PopulateMergeAny: true

If the criteria meets more than 1 instance, all instances bar the first are removed from the database so ensure you criteria is specific enough to get the unique field value.

Default Assets

The script also handles creating default File and image records through the PopulateFileFrom flag. This copies the file from another path (say mysite) and puts the file inside your assets folder.

SilverStripe\Assets\Image:
  lgoptimusl3ii:
    Filename: assets/shop/lgoptimusl3ii.png
    PopulateFileFrom: app/images/demo/large.png

Mysite\PageTypes\Product:
  lgoptimus:
    ProductImage: =>SilverStripe\Assets\Image.lgoptimusl3ii

Extensions

The module also provides extensions that can be opted into depending on your project needs

PopulateMySQLExport

This extension outputs the result of the Populate::requireDefaultRecords() as a SQL Dump on your local machine. This speeds up the process if using Populate as part of a test suite or some other CI service as instead of manually calling the task (which will use the ORM) your test case can be fed raw MySQL to import and hopefully speed up execution times.

To apply the extension add it to Populate, configure the path, flush, then run dev/tasks/PopulateTask

DNADesign\Populate\PopulateMySQLExportExtension:
  export_db_path: ~/path.sql

DNADesign\Populate\Populate:
  extensions
    - DNADesign\Populate\PopulateMySQLExportExtension

Publish configuration

By default the module uses publishSingle() to publish records. If, for whatever reason, you would prefer to that the module uses publishRecursive(), you can enable this by settings the following configuration:

DNADesign\Populate\Populate:
  enable_publish_recursive: true

Allow Populate to run on "live" environments

DANGER ZONE: Please understand that you are about to provide admins with the ability to run Populate on your production environment. Before setting this configuration you should understand and accept the risks related to the loss of production data.

DNADesign\Populate\Populate:
  allow_build_on_live: true

Credits

silverstripe-populate was originally created by wilr and DNA Design.