FAQ

1. What is the canonical way to write a CLI entry file?
2. The shebang
3. The PHP_SAPI check
4. Autoloading Composer
5. Detecting that you are inside a PHAR
6. Building a PHAR with Box as a dependency

What is the canonical way to write a CLI entry file?

A conventional CLI entry file looks like this (see bellow for further explanations):

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

namespace Acme;

use function in_array;
use const PHP_EOL;
use const PHP_SAPI;
use RuntimeException;

if (false === in_array(PHP_SAPI, ['cli', 'phpdbg', 'embed'], true)) {
    echo PHP_EOL.'This app may only be invoked from a command line, got "'.PHP_SAPI.'"'.PHP_EOL;

    exit(1);
}

(static function (): void {
    if (file_exists($autoload = __DIR__.'/../../../autoload.php')) {
        // Is installed via Composer
        include_once $autoload;

        return;
    }

    if (file_exists($autoload = __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php')) {
        // Is installed locally
        include_once $autoload;

        return;
    }

    throw new RuntimeException('Unable to find the Composer autoloader.');
})();

// Execute the application

The shebang

The shebang #!/usr/bin/env php is required to the auto-detection of the type of the script. This allows to use it as follows:

chmod +x bin/acme.php
./bin/acme.php
php bin/acme.php # still works
# Without the shebang line, you can only use the latter

In other words it is not necessary, but a nice to have if you want to make your file executable.

The PHP_SAPI check

For PHP, available SAPIs are: Apache2 (mod_php), FPM, CGI, FastCGI and CLI. There is a few other variants but those are the most commons ones. For more information, see the official PHP doc.

So the following:

if (false === in_array(PHP_SAPI, ['cli', 'phpdbg', 'embed'], true)) {
    echo PHP_EOL.'This app may only be invoked from a command line, got "'.PHP_SAPI.'"'.PHP_EOL;

    exit(1);
}

is purely ot make sure your CLI application is not executed in a non CLI context (for example via a web server). Doing so prevents you to have to worry about web-server related vulnerabilities such as HTTPoxy.

• cli is the standard default you will get
• phpdbg when executing PHP with PHPDBG
• embed if you compile the PHP/ZE into another program

Autoloading Composer

When developing a CLI application, you generally only need to worry about your local autoloader:

include_once __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';

However, if the application is also published as a Composer package, then the autoloader may be found in a different location:

include_once __DIR__.'/../../../autoload.php';

In either cases however, it could be the autoloader file is missing (e.g. if the dependencies are not installed yet). So it is wise to wrap them in a file_exist() check and provide a user-friendly error when no autoloader could be found.

Detecting that you are inside a PHAR

The easiest way to know if your script is executed from within a PHAR is to run the following:

$isInPhar = '' !== Phar::running(false);

See Phar::running() for more information.

Building a PHAR with Box as a dependency

If you need to include Box as part of your dependencies and include it within your PHAR, you will probably encounter the following issue when building your PHAR:

Could not dump the autoloader.
[...]
Could not scan for classes inside "/path/to/vendor/humbug/php-scoper/vendor-hotfix/" which does not appear to be a file nor a folder

This is because by default, Box does not include VCS or dot files which results in the directory vendor/humbug/php-scoper/vendor-hotfix/ to be excluded (as it becomes an empty directory). To circumvent that, you will likely need:

{
   "directories": ["vendor/humbug/php-scoper/vendor-hotfix"]
}

Note that as a result you may want to use the force-autodiscovery setting.

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