Getting Started

If you use the API Platform Symfony variant, the Schema Generator is already installed as a development dependency of your project and can be invoked through Docker:

docker compose exec php \
    vendor/bin/schema

The Schema Generator can also be downloaded independently as a PHAR or installed in an existing project using Composer:

composer require --dev api-platform/schema-generator

The Schema Generator can either be used with Schema.org types (see model scaffolding) or with an OpenAPI documentation (see OpenAPI generation).

Choose your preferred way of designing your API, and run the generator!

Start by browsing Schema.org (or any other RDF vocabulary) and pick types applicable to your application. Schema.org provides tons of schemas including (but not limited to) representations of people, organizations, events, postal addresses, creative work and e-commerce structures. Many other open vocabularies can be found on the LOV website.

Then, write a simple YAML config file similar to the following.

Here we will generate a data model for an address book with the following data:

• a Person which inherits from Thing;
• a PostalAddress (without its class hierarchy).

# api/config/schema.yaml
# The list of types and properties we want to use
types:
  # Parent class of Person
  Thing:
    properties:
      name: ~
  Person:
    # Enable the generation of the class hierarchy (not enabled by default)
    parent: ~
    properties:
      familyName: ~
      givenName: ~
      additionalName: ~
      address: ~
  PostalAddress:
    properties:
      # Force the type of the addressCountry property to text
      addressCountry: { range: 'Text' }
      addressLocality: ~
      addressRegion: ~
      postOfficeBoxNumber: ~
      postalCode: ~
      streetAddress: ~

Note: If no properties are specified for a given type, all its properties will be generated.

The generator also supports enumeration generation. For subclasses of Enumeration, the generator will automatically create a class extending the Enum type provided by myclabs/php-enum. Don’t forget to install this library in your project. Refer you to PHP Enum documentation to see how to use it. The Symfony validation annotation generator automatically takes care of enumerations to validate choices values.

A config file generating an enum class:

types:
  OfferItemCondition: # The generator will automatically guess that OfferItemCondition is subclass of Enum
    properties: {} # Remove all properties of the parent class

Design your API with tools like Stoplight.

Export your OpenAPI documentation to a JSON or to a YAML file and place it somewhere in your project (for instance in api/openapi.yaml).

Write the following config file:

# api/config/schema.yaml
openApi:
  file: '../openapi.yaml'

Run the generator with the config file as parameter:

vendor/bin/schema generate api/src/ api/config/schema.yaml -vv

Using the API Platform Symfony variant:

docker compose exec php \
    vendor/bin/schema generate src/ config/schema.yaml -vv

The corresponding PHP classes will be automatically generated in the src/ directory! Note that the generator takes care of creating directories corresponding to the namespace structure.

Without configuration file, the tool will build the entire Schema.org vocabulary.

If you launch the schema generator again, the previously generated files will be loaded.

It will try to keep as much user-added changes as possible while adding the new changes from the configuration file.

You can also choose to overwrite the file instead.

Browse the configuration documentation.

The Cardinality Extractor is a standalone tool (also used internally by the generator) extracting a property’s cardinality. It extracts cardinality described with the Web Ontology Language (OWL) vocabulary or in GoodRelations. When cardinality cannot be automatically extracted, its value is set to unknown.

Usage:

vendor/bin/schema extract-cardinalities