doctrine/instantiator

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

10988 stars · 63 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A small, lightweight PHP library that creates new instances of any class without invoking its constructor or any of the class's own API. It is maintained under the Doctrine project and widely used as a dependency by testing and ORM tooling.

Use cases

• instantiate a PHP class without calling its constructor
• create object instances for unit tests without triggering side effects
• hydrate entities bypassing constructor logic
• create mock or fixture objects without constructor dependencies
• deserialize objects without running constructors

When to choose

• you need to create instances of classes whose constructors have required dependencies or side effects
• you are building testing tools, mocks, or hydrators in PHP
• you need a tiny, battle-tested utility with huge community adoption

When to avoid

• you want normal object construction with constructor logic executed
• you are not working in PHP
• you need serialization or property population, not just bare instantiation

Facets

library · maturity stable

developer-tools developer-tools programming-languages php object-instantiation reflection constructor-bypass doctrine testing-utility

Member repositories

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="doctrine/instantiator")