PHP quick start

At the end of this guide, you will have created a simple PHP Hello, World! program that connects to the Memgraph database and executes simple queries.

Prerequisites

To follow this guide, you will need:

• A running Memgraph instance. If you need to set up Memgraph, take a look at the Installation guide.
• A basic understanding of graph databases and the property graph model.
• Composer, a tool for dependency management in PHP. Instructions on how to install Composer can be found here.

note

We recommend using the Bolt driver for PHP.

Basic Setup

We'll be using a very simple PHP script in combination with Composer to demonstrate how to connect to a running Memgraph instance.

Let's jump in and connect a simple program to Memgraph.

1. Create a new directory for your application, for example /MyApp and position yourself in it.
2. Create a index.php file and add the following code to it:

<?php

require_once __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';

// Create new Bolt instance
$bolt = new \Bolt\Bolt(new \Bolt\connection\StreamSocket());
// Set Bolt protocol version if needed
$bolt->setProtocolVersions(4.0);
// Connect to database
$bolt->init('MyClient/1.0', '', '');

// Execute query
$res = $bolt->run(
    'CREATE (a:Greeting) SET a.message = $message RETURN id(a) AS nodeId, a.message AS message',
    ['message' => 'Hello, World!']
);
// Pull records from last query
$rows = $bolt->pull();

echo 'Node ' . $rows[0][0] . ' says: ' . $rows[0][1];

3. Create a composer.json file with the following contents:

{
    "name": "memgraph/myapp",
    "description": "This is a simple Hello World app.",
    "require": {
        "php": ">=7.1",
        "stefanak-michal/bolt": "^2.1"
    }
}

4. Execute the next command to install the needed dependencies:

composer install

5. Start the application with the following command:

php -S localhost:4000

You should see an output similar to the following:

Node 1: Hello, World!

Where to next?

For real-world examples of how to use Memgraph, we suggest you take a look at the Tutorials page. You can also browse through the How-to guides section to get an overview of all the functionalities Memgraph offers.