Trying to connect to database - php

Question

I'm working on a rewrite of a project from the ground up and figured I would try to learn MVC along the way. In this case, I've chosen Phalcon and am still working through the fundamentals of converting the tutorials to my own project.
I have two "configuration" settings that I need to account for. First, I need to read a configuration file that has the database credentials (this works properly).
require_once('../fileconfig.php'); // Read config file
$init = new Phalcon\Config\Adapter\Php("../fileconfig.php"); //Convert it to array
But once I have that, how do I actually connect to the database and add it to $di-> (which, if I understand correctly, is effectively the global class? Ultimately, I want to pull the contents of "select * from config" into an array and use that for the application configuration. In this case, var_dump($dbh) returns "null"
//Connect to database
$di->set('db', function() use ($init) {
$dbh = new \Phalcon\Db\Adapter\Pdo\Mysql([
"host" => $init->database->host,
"username" => $init->database->username,
"password" => $init->database->password,
"dbname" => $init->database->dbname
]);
return $dbh;
});
var_dump($dbh); //returns null
If I remove the $di-> section, the array returns the data that I need, but it still doesn't help me figure out how to connect to the database and have it available globally for other functions in the models:
$dbh = new \Phalcon\Db\Adapter\Pdo\Mysql([
"host" => $init->database->host,
"username" => $init->database->username,
"password" => $init->database->password,
"dbname" => $init->database->dbname
]);
Returns:
object(Phalcon\Db\Adapter\Pdo\Mysql)[28]
protected '_descriptor' =>
array (size=4)
'host' => string 'localhost' (length=9)
'username' => string 'testuser' (length=8)
'password' => string 'testpass' (length=8)
'dbname' => string 'testdb' (length=6)
This question seems to be close to what I'm asking, but was more about error handling than the actual connection and I didn't see an answer to my question there.

Answer 1

To resolve your database you need to resolve your di. You could resolve it the file you declared it in with
$di->getShared('db')
But note, you don't want to do that. You want your files seperated with their responsibilities.
Inside of a class that inherits \Phalcon\Mvc\Controller you can use
$this->db->
Please refer to http://docs.phalconphp.com/en/latest/reference/di.html in order to see why to use a DI, and all the nuances of accessing it
It really helps to go through other phalcon projects and look at how everything works together. Please refer to the source here and look at how projects are set up:
https://github.com/phalcon/invo
https://github.com/phalcon/vokuro
https://github.com/phalcon/forum
These are ranked by complexity so start with invo first and then move on