Installation & first generation

Requirements

• PHP 8.1 or later and Composer.
• PDO with the extension for your database.
• PHP CLI with proc_open enabled, used to lint generated output.
• An existing database with at least one table.

Node.js is only needed to build this documentation site, not to use the PHP library.

Install

composer require eril/tbl-class --dev
php vendor/bin/tbl-class init

Run commands from the application root. init creates tblclass.yaml and refuses to overwrite an existing file.

Configure

For MySQL:

include: null
database:
  connection: null
  driver: mysql
  host: env(DB_HOST)
  port: 3306
  name: env(DB_NAME)
  user: env(DB_USER)
  password: env(DB_PASS)
output:
  path: "./"
  namespace: ""
  naming:
    strategy: full
    overrides: {}

Set these process environment variables before generation. .env files are not loaded automatically. See configuration for PostgreSQL, SQLite, bootstrap files, and custom PDO connections.

Generate

php vendor/bin/tbl-class generate

The default output is Tbl/Tbl.php, containing the class Tbl\Tbl. Generation detects constant collisions and lints a temporary file before replacing existing output.

Autoload

Merge this into your application's composer.json:

{
  "autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
      "Tbl\\": "Tbl/"
    }
  }
}

composer dump-autoload

Use the generated class after your application loads Composer's autoloader:

use Tbl\Tbl;

$sql = 'SELECT ' . Tbl::users__id . ' FROM ' . Tbl::users;

This example requires a users table with an id column. Your generated constants follow your actual schema.

Keep the generated file available in production and place its mapping under autoload, even when the generator is installed under require-dev. See autoloading for other output paths.

Check for changes

php vendor/bin/tbl-class check --diff

An unchanged snapshot returns exit code 0. Detected differences return 1; a missing generated file returns 2. Learn what check compares.