Symfony, Doctrine: An exception occurred while executing ‘CREATE TABLE migration_versions

I got this error over and over. I was using a schema_filter setting in Symfony, and that was the source of the problem.

This Laravel user had a similar problem:

It’s due to schema_filter.

The schema filter docs give an example where they use a negative assertion to exclude tables that match a regex.

The function of the filter is to return a list of tables to include — that is, the filter returns true if a given table name is acceptable.

So (once I figured that out), I made a regex like this:

schema_filter: ~^(event)$~

My goal was to produce Doctrine migrations only for one table.

At that point, I started to have error messages as Doctrine kept trying to create the migration_versions table.

As the link above explained, the migration_versions table was being filtered out. The fix was:

schema_filter: ~^(event|migration_versions)$~

I had to add the versioning table to the list of acceptable tables.

That seems weird, but there’s a clue here:

Doctrine tools use Doctrine to store migration metadata.

Is this a good design decision, to use Doctrine’s classes to manage the metadata for Doctrine itself?

It’s like part of Doctrine has a dependency on Doctrine, and it exposes Doctrine’s inner working to the configuration layer.