The MongoDB PHP driver was rewritten from scratch two years ago to support the PHP 5, PHP 7, and HHVM architectures. The current architecture is shown in the following diagram:

Currently, we have official drivers for all three architectures with full support for the underlying functionality.

Installation is a two-step process. First, we need to install the MongoDB extension. This extension is dependent on the version of PHP (or HHVM) that we have installed and can be done using brew in macOS.  The following example is with PHP 7.0:

brew install php70-mongodb

Then, use composer (a widely-used dependency manager for PHP) as shown in the following example:

composer require mongodb/mongodb

Connecting to the database can be done by using the connection string URL or by passing an array of options.

Using the connection string URL, we have the following code:

$client = new MongoDBClient($uri = 'mongodb://127.0.0.1/', array $uriOptions = [], array $driverOptions = [])

For example, to connect to a replica set using SSL authentication, we use the following code:

$client = new MongoDBClient('mongodb://myUsername:[email protected],rs2.example.com/?ssl=true&replicaSet=myReplicaSet&authSource=admin');

Or we can use the $uriOptions parameter to pass in parameters without using the connection string URL, as shown in the following code:

$client = new MongoDBClient(
    'mongodb://rs1.example.com,rs2.example.com/'
    [
        'username' => 'myUsername',
        'password' => 'myPassword',
        'ssl' => true,
        'replicaSet' => 'myReplicaSet',
        'authSource' => 'admin',
    ],
);

The set of $uriOptions and the connection string URL options available are analogous to the ones used for Ruby and Python.