n this article we'll look at the advantages of using PHP CLI. I'll show you how to test PHP's Command Line Interface / Interpreter (CLI) on your server, and then we'll look at some of the options available for PHP CLI including the interactive shell and how to create executable scripts. Finally, I'll give you a couple of examples of scripts to use to maintain your server written in PHP.

He introduces the command-line executable for PHP and shows how to use it to create some simple scripts (including ones that take in command-line arguments). He shows how to make a simple script to monitor disk usage (using the unix command "df") and a backup script that copies files/folders over to another device.

Over the weekend, I was toying with the idea of interactive cli applications using readline() and Zend Form for validating input. My motivation for using Zend Form or rather Zend Form elements was to exploit the power of features such as labels, validators, filters and the prospect of reusing forms within web application code.

His example code defines a Filter for the form errors (returning them as a string) and a "Cli" class that handles the interaction with the command line. Next up is a class defining the form elements - a prompt for a color name and either of the words "thank" and "you". The Cli class transforms the form elements into prompts on the command line and lets you define validators to check their input.

In the past I would just use my iPhone's email-to-txt email address. However, when I received the txt message, it wasn't formated very pretty, and it would have a different "From Number." So if we had a crazy day, I would have 20-30 message threads in my iPhone all about Nagios. [...] What I like out this setup is with Twilio, I can buy a phone number for $1 a month. So all my notifications come through the same number.

He's included the PHP code he uses to send the notifications (using the Twillo library) and the Nagios commands he configured to send the notifications to that script via the command line.

In my last post we spoke about building a small microframework with PHP. The main goal of this kind of framework was to be able to map urls to plain PHP classes and become those classes easily testeable with PHPUnit. Now we're going to take a step forward. [...] It's pretty straightforward to create a command line interface (CLI) for our microframework.

He shows how to use the getopt function and the $GLOBALS superglobal to pull in arguments given to the command line script. He hooks this into the framework and makes it possible to define the controller and action to execute (with a few examples to show it in action). You can find this updated code on his github account.

Usually when creating a command line script you would parse $_SERVER['argv'], validate values and check whether required switches are available or not. With the Microsoft_Console_Command class from the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, you can ease up this task. Let's compare writing a simple "hello" command.

He compares the two sides of making a PHP command-line script: the "ugly way" using normal PHP code and $_SERVER['argv'] and the "easy way" using the Microsoft_Console_Command class that uses a class to define the functionality. There's also methods to grab specific arguments, pull from STDIN and get environment variables.

OAuth is great - there's no need to save users' passwords, it's - in theory - a consistent way to interact with other services, and it's hopefully something that your users are familiar and comfortable using. But if you're not just interacting with your users' accounts - for example, your application uses a single account on a service to broadcast messages, or analyze data - getting or renewing the access token can be painful.

He illustrates the problem with an example connecting to Twitter and even points out a script that makes bridging this gap simpler. Unfortunately, it's not exactly what he needed, so he reworked the idea with a call to the Twitter API using a Zend_Oauth_Consumer and a custom callback. The script is then set up with some command line options for inputting the key and secret information. Also included is functionality letting you define a configuration file. You can see the final result here on github.

When I decided to give PHP a closer look, I wondered if PHP was a browser-only technology or if it could be used for command line scripting. It turns out that one can write operating system level scripts with PHP as discussed in online resources such as Command Line Scripting in PHP, Command Line PHP on Microsoft Windows, and Executing PHP files. In this blog post, I look at PHP command line scripting at an introductory level.

He talks about some of the basics - setting up a "Hello World" script to be run as PHP (and running it) as well as adding in the ability to take command-line arguments. He shows how to get environment information and run other command calls through the PHP script. He also points out the handy php_sapi_name method that can be used to detect whether or not the script is running on the command line.

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fact that there is great opportunity in scaling, even for small applications.

Using the SDK, he shows how to create the command-line tool buy craeting a management client and setting up the command line parameters to give to the setInstanceCountBySlot() method. This gives you the ability to spawn off as many new "slots" (instances) as you might need quickly and easily.

phix is a small command-line tool for PHP applications. I created it to fix (pun intended) the problem of how to easily automate the tasks involved in creating and (especially) maintaining components. These tasks aren't built into phix; they are commands that ship with the phix distribution. You can create your own commands to run inside phix too, and it's easy to do so

The phix tool (easily installed from PEAR) lets you either use built-in commands or custom ones to manage libraries with a few different kinds of commands - current status, initialize a library, upgrade a library and manage the full web application. As of the time of this post, the current version is phix-0.10.4.

In this video I'm going to be demonstrating migrations which I touched on in the last video but I felt I should go into them in more depth. Migrations [...] are essentially a way to stage changes for your database in a way that means the changes can be independent from the schema as a whole.

He walks you through the creation of a migration with the help of the Oil command line tool. The generated classes include "up" and "down" methods for the creation and rollback of your changes. He shows the process to create a simple task and how to use the built-in console to interactively work with the framework. You can find out more about Fuel on the Fuel documentation section of the project's site.