In previous parts ([part 1](/blog/alice-nelmio-hautelook-faker-and-how-to-upgrade-doctrine-fixtures-part-1) and [part 2](/blog/alice-nelmio-hautelook-faker-and-how-to-upgrade-doctrine-fixtures-part-2)) we looked at a situation where we are stuck with Alice, Nelmio, Hautelook, Faker legacy mess and need a way out to modern maintainable Doctrine.

This is the final part. **The upgrade is finished and closed for the time being**. In an unexpected way, it was fast, easy to migrate to, and will be even easier to maintain. It took me a couple of months of deep thinking and experiments, because there was a trap solution that would take us 6-8 months of hard work and would create even more legacy code. Lesson learned: don't fall for marketing and GPT answers.

Let's look into it.

Tomas Votruba

The final part of a series on migrating away from Alice/Nelmio/Hautelook/Faker fixture dependencies to plain native Doctrine fixtures. The author avoided a trap solution (migrating to Foundry) and instead built a single custom fixture-loading command that unifies both native and Alice fixtures under one ReferenceRepository. This eliminated five packages. String-based references were replaced with typed class constants enforced by PHPStan rules. Alice YAML/PHP fixture files were converted to native Doctrine PHP fixtures, leveraging Rector and GPT for bulk conversion. The result is a leaner, more maintainable setup with only doctrine/data-fixtures remaining as an external dependency.

Alice, Nelmio, Hautelook, Faker - How to Upgrade Doctrine Fixtures - Part 3

3. Remove Nelmio, Hautelook, Alice and Faker dependencies