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Bootstrapping a CLI PHP application in Vanilla PHP

Erika Heidi on September 20, 2019

Introduction PHP is well known for its popularity with web applications and CMSs, but what many people don't know is that PHP is also a ...

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SyntaxSeed (Sherri W) • Sep 25 '19 • Edited

Following this on Termux on my phone & can't get Composer to work.

So here's an autoloader for anyone who needs to do this without composer:

(Include this file into the minicli file.)

<?php
/**
 * Example project-specific auto-loading implementation.
 *
 * After registering this autoload function with SPL, the namespaces on the left of the loaders array will load classes found in the paths on the right.
 *
 * @param string $class The fully-qualified class name.
 * @return void
 */

 spl_autoload_register(function ($class) {
    $loaders = [
        'Minicli\\' => '/lib/',
        'App\\' => '/app/'
    ];

foreach($loaders as $prefix => $base_dir){
    $len = strlen($prefix);
    if(strncmp($prefix, $class,$len) !== 0){
        continue;
    }
    $relative_class = substr($class, $len);

    $file = __DIR__ . $base_dir .
       str_replace('\\', '/',
         $relative_class) .
       '.php';

    if (file_exists($file)) {
        require $file;
        return;
    }
} //end foreach
});

Ezell Frazier • Sep 21 '19

PHP as a general purpose tool? I'm intrigued.

Osqui LittleRiver • Sep 24 '19

Well, it isn't useful for building native graphical applications, for instance. Also it has some problems to manage serial port (I use Arduino boards a lot). So...about this aspect Php is far behind Python, I think

Erika Heidi • Sep 25 '19

That's precisely why the post uses the therm CLI, because it's for the command line only: scripts. Surely, PHP can't solve all problems, but it is a very low barrier language that many people are already familiar with. I said all these things in the article's introduction by the way

Michael Als • Sep 20 '19

Excellent article. Thank you!

Diego Pinzón • Mar 17 '21

Great tutorial Erika, it's really very helpful for my daily working. I just wanna mention that I've worked on Windows 10 and xampp, so, if you get those too, for running on a console, yo need, for example: #!C:\xampp\php\php.exe.

BTW, vim is my least favorite editor, hahahahaha!!

Waleed Barakat • Sep 21 '19

Nice, but what is the output of this in real life, is there is a demo or something to try?

Thanks

Ricardo Castro • Sep 21 '19

Well, you can do a lot with this, if you use to use Symfony or Laravel, for sure, at some point you die use the cli to generate new controller, entities/models, services, database and the tables... Your imagination is the limit

Erika Heidi • Sep 22 '19

Hi! The idea is that we build together a little framework for creating PHP applications in the command line, we'll refactor a few things in the next posts of this series, but the way it is now it has two example commands that you can use as base to build something else. It's very versatile. You can find this code here: erikaheidi/minicli:0.1.0.