An overview of creating this project's database and how to configure and use it.
Our project comes with all the database tables it needs by defining a series of Migrations. Migration files can be specific to one table (or even one column) or they can group a number of changes together, as long as running them in order produces the desired result.
We start with one big migration to create the tables we need. From the command line:
./spark migrate:create create_playground_tables
This generates our first migration file which can now be filled in with our database tables. Later migrations can change any of this so there is no need to get it all correct on first try.
Before we can use our database we need to supply the connection info. The User Guide has a lot of information on how to do this: Database Configuration
For our project we will follow some secure best practices and leave all sensitive information out of our config files (e.g. app/Config/Database.php) and place it instead in our .env file. This ensures our database credentials never go into a repo, and it positions our project to use different database connections for each environment.
Since we cannot provide .env in the repo, there is one pre-configured for a simple test database at .env.example, based one the version that comes with the framework, env (no leading period). Rename it to .env to use it.
Once migrations are in place and we have a working database connection we are ready to create the database. Use the spark command to run through all migrations so our project has the latest database structure:
./spark migrate
Database Seeds let our project start with some initial data. This could be settings or preferences, test data, or really anything. Our project will seed a number of examples into each of its tables so there is something to look at, as well as some examples to work with. Seeders can be fully-namespaced references, but our initial seeder will be run right out of app/Database/Seeds/. Use the command line tool to run the seeder:
./spark db:seed PlaygroundSeeder