README

This plugin generates a DBML file from your current present CakePHP table files including plugin ones.

See https://www.dbml.org/, https://dbdiagram.io and https://dbdocs.io/ to get more information about DBML.

Installation

The recommended way to install this plugin via composer is:

composer require lordsimal/cakephp-dbml --dev

Then execute

bin/cake plugin load LordSimal/CakephpDbml

or add this to your src/Application.php manually

public function bootstrap(): void
{
    parent::bootstrap();
    
    // Other plugins
    $this->addPlugin('LordSimal/CakephpDbml');
}

How to use

After installing the plugin you now have a new command available to you:

bin/cake generate_dbml 

After executing that you should have a new file in your applications root folder called dbml-export.dbml

This text file can then be copy-pasted into e.g. https://dbdiagram.io where you can very easily drag&drop your tables into a structure which is more visually appealing

Possible warning messages

It is possible that you get warning messages like these:

-> % bin/cake generate_dbml   
Table for Tokens (tokens) from Plugin "Tools" is not present

This means that you current database schema doesn't have that table but your code (or in this case the plugin "Tools") contains a table file which has been detected.

Configuration

All default config-keys can be seen in this plugins config/config.php file

• Dbml.path => The path where the generated file will be placed
• Dbml.filename => The filename
• Dbml.blacklistedPlugins=> Array of plugins which should be skipped
• Dbml.blacklistedTables => Array of table names which should be skipped

You can extend any of these values just by adding the following to your config/app_local.php

return [
    'Dbml' => [
        'blacklistedPlugins' => [
            'CakeDC/Users',
        ],
        'blacklistedTables' => [
            'social_accounts',
            'token',
            'queued_jobs',
            'queue_processes'
        ]
    ],
];

How does it work?

Executing the command from above will look through all your table files (in your app as well as all installed plugins) and load their schema data including relations.

By default it does exclude the plugins DebugKit as well as Migrations which are present in new CakePHP applications

If you want to have more information on which tables and which associations are being detected execute the command like so

bin/cake generate_dbml -v

After gathering all the table and association data they get formatted into a structure which is more easily written to the DBML file.

Acknowledgement

Big shoutout to @dereuromark and especially his https://github.com/dereuromark/cakephp-model-graph plugin which definitely inspired and helped me create this plugin!