Doctrine migrations wont recognise changes to annotations (in production) - php

Question

The original problem
The reasons, notes and members fields bellow where #ORM\Column(type="string", length=20000) which did not work because that is too long for a VARCHAR so I changed them all to #ORM\Column(type="text")
And Now
It is possible that I have misunderstood the correct way to handle migrations in productions but I can't get my database to match my entity. Running php bin/console doctrine:migrations:diff or php bin/console doctrine:schema:update --dump-sql doctrine tries to update the database to an old version of Request.php like it has been cached but even after running clear-metadata the migrations all say VARCHAR(20000) like in this sql dump after I manually changed the database:
ALTER TABLE request CHANGE reasons reasons VARCHAR(20000) NOT NULL, CHANGE notes notes VARCHAR(20000) DEFAULT NULL, CHANGE members members VARCHAR(20000) NOT NULL;
Current Request.php
namespace App\Entity;
use App\Repository\RequestRepository;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;
/**
* #ORM\Entity(repositoryClass=RequestRepository::class)
*/
class Request
{
/**
* #ORM\Id
* #ORM\GeneratedValue
* #ORM\Column(type="integer")
*/
private $id;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="time")
* #Assert\LessThan(propertyPath="endTime", message="The booking must start before it ends")
*/
private $startTime;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="time")
*/
private $endTime;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="date")
*/
private $date;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="text")
*/
private $reasons;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="text", nullable=true)
*/
private $notes;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="text")
*/
private $status;
/**
* #ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity=User::class, inversedBy="requests")
* #ORM\JoinColumn(nullable=true)
*/
private $user;
/**
* #ORM\Column(type="text")
*/
private $members;
I have tried removing the Request.php entity but then doctrine gets upset that it is gone. (I do have a relational link to the user table here but it is one to many).
Changing the names of members reasons and notes worked but when I changed the names back it wanted to set them back to VARCHAR(20000). Where is it holding this info. How do I get rid of it?

Answer 1

Doctrine Metadata is cached. When you clear the cache (and warming it back up), symfony runs "compiler passes" that among other things read annotations to build the metadata, proxy objects, registers repositories, all this kind of stuff (obviously other doctrine-unrelated stuff as well).
Running bin/console cache:clear should solve your problems. (It also should be part of your deployment process. And unless you copy over the vendor dir as well, composer install too).