Summary

Throughout this chapter, we have familiarized ourselves with some of the interesting features and tooling around PHP CLI. This chapter started with a basic introduction to PHP CLI SAPI, as one of the many SAPI interfaces in PHP. We then took a look into a simple but powerful Console component, learning how easy it is to create our own console applications. The I/O streams section helped us understand the standard streams, and how they are handled by PHP. Finally, we looked into the process control functions offered by the PCNTL extension. Combined together, these functions open up a wide range of possibilities to write our console applications. While the overall console application development might not seem interesting enough in comparison to more browser-facing applications, it certainly has its role in modern development. The CLI environment simply allows much greater control of our application.

Moving forward, we will take a look into one of the most important and interesting...