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Webmozart Console

Latest release: 1.0.0-beta5

PHP >= 5.3.9

A usable, beautiful and easily testable console toolkit written in PHP.

Goal

The goal of this package is:

• to build PHP applications similar to the "git" command
• with a minimum amount of code
• that are testable
• robust
• and beautiful.

None of the existing console libraries matched these requirements, so I refactored the Symfony Console component into what you can see here.

Installation

Use Composer to install the package:

Basic Configuration

Console applications are configured via configuration classes. As example, we will create the "git" command in PHP:

This basic configuration tells the console that the executable is called "git" and that the current version is 1.0.0. Let's create the "git" executable now:

The complicated autoload block makes sure that the autoload file is found both when you run the executable directly in your package and when your package is installed in another project via Composer.

Change the permissions of your executable and try to run it:

Commands

So far, our application doesn't do much. Let's add a command "log" that displays the latest commits:

As you can see, the execution of the command is delegated to a LogCommandHandler. Since the handler is a separate class, it can easily be tested in isolation. Let's implement a basic handler:

The handle() method of our command handler retrieves up to three arguments:

• Args $args: The arguments and options passed when calling the command.
• IO $io: The I/O, which gives access to the standard input, the standard output and the error output.
• Command $command: The currently executed command.

You can leave away the arguments that you don't need.

Every handler should return 0 if it was processed successfully and any integer between 1 and 255 if it failed.

Let's run the command:

Arguments

Next we'll add an argument <branch> to the "log" command with which we can select the branch to display:

We added an optional argument "branch" with the default value "master". We can access the value of the argument through the Args instance in the handler:

Let's run the command with the argument:

The second argument of the addArgument() method accepts a bitwise combination of different flags:

Options

Options are additional, optional settings that you can pass to your command. Let's add the option --max=<limit> to our command which limits the number of displayed commits to the passed limit:

The configuration of options is very similar to the configuration of arguments. We created a --max option, which requires a value. If the option is not set by the user, its value defaults to 25.

We can access the passed value with the getOption() method in our command handler:

Additionally, you will frequently need the isOptionSet() method, which tells you whether the user actually passed the option when calling the command.

Let's run the command with the option:

Options support short names that consist of a single character only. Instead of two leading dashes, short option names are only prefixed with one dash, for example: -m. Let's add this alias to our option by setting the second argument of the addOption() method:

Now the command can also be run like this:

Like for arguments, options support a bitwise combination of different flags that control how the option is processed:

Dependencies

Very often, our command handlers rely on external services to access information or execute business logic. These services can be injected through the constructor of the command handler. For example, assume that we need a CommitRepository to access the commits listed in the "log" command:

Since the CommitRepository is injected into the command handler, we can easily replace the repository with a mock object when we test the handler.

We also need to change the configuration to inject the repository:

If your application grows, a lot of objects will be created whenever the configure() method is executed - even if the commands that need these objects are not executed. Let's change our call to setHandler() to a closure so that the handler is executed on demand:

Now, the LogCommandHandler and its dependencies are only created when "log" command is executed.

Sub-Commands

The "log" command was a very simple example, but many real-world use cases are more complicated than that. Consider the "git remote" command, which is split into several sub-commands:

Such sub-commands can be introduced with the beginSubCommand() method in the configuration:

Like regular commands, sub-commands accept options, arguments and command handlers. However, instead of creating one command handler per sub-command, it is often more convenient to create a single handler with one method per sub-command. The handler method can be selected with setHandlerMethod().

The basic implementation of our RemoteCommandHandler is very similar to the command handler of the "log" command:

If we inject a working RemoteManager, we can execute both commands now:

If we want to execute the "list" command by default if no sub-command is selected, we need to mark it as default command with markDefault():

Now we can run the list command with:

At last, you can use markAnonymous() if you want to run the command just with git remote, but not with git remote list.

Colors and Styles

The console supports colors and styles in the output that you pass to the IO class. Let's output some bold text for example:

Just like in HTML, the styles are inserted in your text using markup tags. The following styles are defined by default:

You can change the existing styles or add custom styles using the addStyle() method in your configuration:

Here is a list of methods that can be called on the Style class:

Tables

You can draw tables with the Table class:

Tables support word wrapping, so that overlong text does not break the output. The default output of the above table is similar to this:

You can change the style of the table by passing a custom TableStyle to the constructor. Either build your own TableStyle or use one of the predefined ones:

The following predefined table styles exist:

Using Symfony Helpers

Since this library is a complete refactor of the Symfony Console component you can not use the Symfony Console helpers out of the box. If you want to use them you need to wrap the input and output accordingly:

If you find this to cumbersome and you use it many times in your code, consider using traits:

Authors

• Bernhard Schussek a.k.a. @webmozart
• The Community Contributors

Contribute

Contributions to are very welcome!

• Report any bugs or issues you find on the issue tracker.
• You can grab the source code at the package’s Git repository.

Support

If you are having problems, send a mail to [email protected] or shout out to @webmozart on Twitter.

License

All contents of this package are licensed under the MIT license.