The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial about the migration library you never knew you needed for your PHP applications - Phinx (for database migrations).

You’re building an application, and you need to share the database’s structure with your team. After all, you want everyone to be up and running as soon as possible. What do you do? SQL dumps of table structures? You could… but that’s so very primitive – and can be time consuming to import, too! More often than not, database migrations are the answer.

In this tutorial, we’ll go through a framework-agnostic package for building and executing database migrations called Phinx.

He starts by helping you get the tool installed via Composer and initializing your environment for migrations and seeds. He covers the configuration of the tool via a simple YAML file and the creation of first migration files based on an existing table structure. He walks through the code involved to create the tables, add indexes and foreign keys. He shows how to run the migrations, gives an example of the error output and modifying the current database structure.