Is it possible to load doctrine fixtures without deleting database

Use the --append option

php app/console help doctrine:fixtures:loadUsage: doctrine:fixtures:load [--fixtures[="..."]] [--append] [--em="..."] [--purge-with-truncate]Options: --fixtures             The directory or file to load data fixtures from. (multiple values allowed) --append               Append the data fixtures instead of deleting all data from the database first. --em                   The entity manager to use for this command. --purge-with-truncate  Purge data by using a database-level TRUNCATE statement

DoctrineFixtures are nice for the first init of an empty database or in development - but not in production.

Take a look at DoctrineMigrations and symfonys DcotrineMigrationsBundle, this is a good and safe way to migrate your database in production.

It is possible to update previously added data to DB (which was loaded by running app/console doctrine:fixtures:load). I used EntityManager->createQuery for that.

But I still wonder if there is or ever will be an opportunity to do it by simply running an app/console command. Something like app/console doctrine:schema:update --force, but applied to the data itself.

For now I had to write a ton of code to get my data updated and appended properly. For example to make --append work I had to write the following:

    class LoadCategoryData implements FixtureInterface    {        /**         * {@inheritDoc}         */        public function load(ObjectManager $em)        {            //a category has name and shortcut name (st)            $categories = array (                [0]=> array('name' => 'foo', 'st' = 'bar'),                ...            );            foreach ($categories as $cat) {                $query = $em->createQuery(                    "SELECT c                    FROM MyBundle:Category c                    WHERE c.st = ?1"                )->setParameter(1, $cat['st'])->getResult();                if (count($query) == 0) {                    $c = new Category();                    $c->setName($cat['name']);                    $c->setSt($cat['st']);                    $em->persist($c);                }                $em->flush();            }        }    }