Php Cli Tools Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Standardization of CLI Workflows: Unifies output formatting, user prompts, and progress indicators across Laravel/PHP CLI tools, reducing inconsistencies in logging, error handling, and user interactions.
• Build vs. Buy for CLI Utilities: Eliminates the need to build custom solutions for:
  • Progress Tracking: Replace manual echo loops with cli\progress\Bar() for consistent progress bars in Laravel migrations or queue workers.
  • Tabular Data: Standardize API response logging or database inspection outputs using cli\Table (e.g., php artisan db:inspect). As of v0.13.2, table rows can be populated directly from an iterator/generator, enabling streaming of large or lazily-loaded result sets (e.g., cursor-based DB queries, paginated API dumps) into a table without materializing everything in memory first.
  • User Input: Add interactive prompts (e.g., cli\prompt()) to Laravel Artisan commands for configuration or confirmation steps.
• Use Cases:
  • Debugging Tools: Integrate cli\Tree to visualize Laravel service container bindings or route hierarchy.
  • CI/CD Enhancements: Use cli\notify\Spinner for async task feedback in deployment scripts.
  • Legacy System Modernization: Migrate monolithic PHP scripts to modular CLI tools with structured output (e.g., cli\out_padded() for aligned logs).
  • Large-Data Inspection: Stream rows from Eloquent cursor(), generators, or paginated APIs straight into cli\Table using the new iterator support, keeping memory footprint flat for large datasets.

When to Consider This Package

• Adopt if:
  • Your Laravel project requires consistent CLI output formatting (e.g., APIs, cron jobs, or Artisan commands with multi-line responses).
  • You need cross-platform CLI utilities (Windows/Linux/macOS compatibility is actively maintained).
  • Your team uses PHP 5.6+ and wants to avoid reinventing wheel for:
    • Progress bars, tables, or tree structures.
    • User prompts/interactive workflows.
    • Argument parsing for complex CLI tools.
  • You’re building internal tools (e.g., Laravel admin dashboards, deployment scripts) where UX matters.
  • You frequently render large or lazy-loaded datasets in tables and want to avoid building custom streaming/pagination logic (v0.13.2 iterator support).
• Look elsewhere if:
  • Your stack is pure Symfony/Laravel with no CLI needs—use Symfony’s Console component instead.
  • You require modern PHP 8.3+ features: This package prioritizes backward compatibility (PHP 5.6+) over cutting-edge syntax.
  • Your team prefers alternative libraries (e.g., symfony/console, league/cli-table, spatie/cli).
  • You’re not using Composer: The package assumes Composer-based dependency management.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For Executives:

"This package lets us standardize and elevate our CLI tools—think of it as ‘Tailwind CSS for PHP command line output.’

• Reduce DevOps noise: Replace fragmented echo statements in scripts with consistent, reusable output (tables, progress bars, prompts).
• Improve UX for internal tools: If your team uses Laravel Artisan for admin tasks, this adds polished, interactive workflows (e.g., confirmations, menus).
• Future-proof CI/CD: Integrate cli\progress\Bar into deployment scripts to visually track long-running tasks (e.g., database migrations). It’s a low-code, high-impact way to modernize our tooling without hiring extra engineers."

For Engineering:

"This gives us WP-CLI’s battle-tested CLI utilities—but without the WordPress dependency. Key wins:

• Progress bars: Replace for loops with cli\progress\Bar for migrations/queue workers (e.g., php artisan migrate --progress).
• Tabular output: Standardize API response logging or tinker inspection with cli\Table (auto-detects piped output for scripts). v0.13.2 adds iterator-backed rows, so we can stream from cursor(), generators, or paginated APIs without buffering the whole result set.
• Interactive prompts: Add cli\prompt() to Artisan commands for user confirmation (e.g., php artisan deploy --confirm).
• Cross-platform: Works on Windows/Linux/macOS (unlike some Symfony tools). Downside: It’s not Laravel-native, but the abstraction layer is minimal. For most CLI needs, this is better than rolling our own."*

For Developers:

"If you’re tired of writing custom echo loops or hacking together progress bars, this package saves hours. Example:

// Before: Manual progress bar (error-prone)
for ($i = 0; $i < 100; $i++) {
    echo str_repeat('=', $i) . '>' . str_repeat(' ', 100 - $i) . "\r";
}

// After: One-liner with `cli\progress\Bar`
$bar = new \cli\progress\Bar('Processing...', 100);
while ($bar->tick()) { /* ... */ }

New in v0.13.2: feed a table from any iterator—no array preloading:

$table = new \cli\Table();
$table->setHeaders(['ID', 'Name']);
$table->setRows(User::query()->cursor()); // streams rows
$table->display();

It’s MIT-licensed, actively maintained, and used by WP-CLI—so it’s battle-tested for real-world CLI apps."