Yii2 Gii Datasource Generator ¶

1. Features
2. Requirements
3. Installation
4. How it works
5. Comparison to yii2-giiant
6. License

Generate Yii2 models, search models, controllers and CRUD views for an entire database schema in one step — with connection management, live schema preview, and an ER diagram — instead of running Gii's Model and CRUD generators one table at a time.

Features ¶

• Connection registry — save multiple named database connections; each is tested live before it's stored, and persists automatically with zero manual edits to your app's config/web.php.
• Schema preview with ER diagram — see every table and view in a connection's schema, with a live entity-relationship diagram rendered from real foreign key metadata.
• Generate-all-at-once — pick the tables you want, review a single combined diff/preview screen covering every model, search model, controller, and CRUD view, then confirm once to write them all.
• Collision-safe multi-connection support — every generated class and file is prefixed with the connection's name (e.g. inventory_db → InventoryDbOrder), so two connections that both have an order table never collide, and each model is pinned to its own database connection.
• Correct relations — foreign-key-based relations between generated models point at the correct connection-prefixed class name in both directions, even across a full batch generation run.

Requirements ¶

• PHP >= 8.1
• Yii2 (yiisoft/yii2 ~2.0.45)
• yiisoft/yii2-gii ~2.2.0 (installed automatically as a dependency)
• A relational database with a yii\db\Schema driver: MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite, Oracle, or CUBRID. Non-relational sources are not supported in this release.

Installation ¶

Add the package with Composer:

composer require josemodi97/yii2-gii-datasource-generator

No further configuration is required — the extension registers itself into your application via Composer's extra.bootstrap mechanism on every request (the same pattern used by other zero-config Yii2 extensions), so config/web.php and config/console.php never need to be edited.

Once installed, visit /gii-datasource-generator/connection/index in your dev-environment application (access is restricted to 127.0.0.1/::1 by default, same as Gii itself — configure allowedIPs on the module if you need broader access).

How it works ¶

1. Add a connection — pick a driver, enter connection details, and it's tested live before being saved to config/gii-datasources.php (add this file to your .gitignore — it holds plaintext credentials, same trust boundary as Gii itself).
2. Preview the schema — see every table/view, with an ER diagram for relational sources.
3. Generate All — select the objects you want, review the combined file list (grouped into Models / Search Models / Controllers / Views, with inline diff/preview), then confirm.

Everything generated is placed in your app's normal models/, controllers/, and views/ folders, using the connection's name as a class/file prefix — so it's safe to run this against several databases in the same project.

Comparison to yii2-giiant ¶

yii2-giiant is the established tool for batch-generating CRUD from a schema, using the db component your app already has configured. This package targets a different scenario: managing several independent database connections in one project through a UI (rather than one connection already wired into your app config), with a schema/ER preview step before generation, and connection-prefixed naming so multiple databases' generated code can never collide.

License ¶

MIT — see LICENSE.