Minicli is an experimental dependency-free toolkit for building CLI-centric applications in PHP. Minicli was created as an educational experiment and a way to go dependency-free when building simple command-line applications in PHP. It can be used for microservices, personal dev tools, bots and little fun things.

Minicli 2 has a lot of improved features, and about 98% test coverage with Pest PHP.

What does it mean to be dependency-free? It means that you can build a working CLI PHP application without dozens of nested user-land dependencies. The basic minicli/minicli package has only testing dependencies, and a couple system requirements:

• PHP >= 7.3
• ext-readline for obtaining user input

It gives you a lot of room to choose your own dependencies.

There are two ways to get started. If you want the bare minimum:

If you just want to set up a few simple commands to run through minicli, all you need to do is to create an App and register your commands as anonymous functions.

1. Create an empty project
2. Run composer require minicli/minicli - this will generate a new composer.json file.
3. Create a minicli script with the following content:

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php

if (php_sapi_name() !== 'cli') {
    exit;
}

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

use Minicli\App;
use Minicli\Command\CommandCall;

$app = new App();
$app->setSignature('./minicli mycommand');

$app->registerCommand('mycommand', function(CommandCall $input) {
    echo "My Command!";

    var_dump($input);
});

$app->runCommand($argv);

Then, make it executable and run minicli with your command:

chmod +x minicli
./minicli mycommand

For a more structured application using Controllers and Services, it's best to use Command Namespaces. Our application template repository is a great starting point / template to set up Minicli that way.

To create a new project using the minicli/application template, run:

composer create-project --prefer-dist minicli/application myapp

This will generate a directory structure like the following:

.
app
└── Command
    └── Help
        ├── DefaultController.php
        ├── TableController.php
        └── TestController.php
├── composer.json
├── docs
├── LICENSE
├── minicli
├── mkdocs.yml
└── README.md

Each directory inside app/Command represents a Command Namespace. The classes inside app/Command/Help represent subcommands that you can access through the main help command.

You can now run the boostrapped application with:

./minicli help

The documentation contains more detailed information about creating commands and working with output.

Minicli supports the use of color themes to change the style of command line output. There is currently 1 built-in theme other than the default theme:

• Unicorn

To set the theme, pass in a configuration array with a theme value when initializing App in the script. Built-in themes need a leading \ character:

$app = new App([
    'theme' => '\Unicorn'
]);

To use the default built-in theme, do not include the theme configuration setting, or set it to an empty string.

User-defined themes can also be created and defined in your project. In this case, set the theme name including its namespace without a leading \:

$app = new App([
    'theme' => 'App\Theme\Blue'
]);

The above setting would use the following example theme:

<?php
// File: app/Theme/BlueTheme.php

namespace App\Theme;

use Minicli\Output\Theme\DefaultTheme;
use Minicli\Output\CLIColors;

class BlueTheme extends DefaultTheme
{
    public function getThemeColors(): array
    {
        return [
            'default'     => [ CLIColors::$FG_BLUE ],
            'alt'         => [ CLIColors::$FG_BLACK, CLIColors::$BG_BLUE ],
            'info'        => [ CLIColors::$FG_WHITE],
            'info_alt'    => [ CLIColors::$FG_WHITE, CLIColors::$BG_BLUE ]
        ];
    }
}

User-defined themes only need to define styles which will override those in the default theme.

The following tutorials on dev.to compose a series named "Building Minicli", where we create minicli from scratch:

• Part 1: Bootstrapping a CLI PHP Application in Vanilla PHP [ minicli v.0.1.0 ]
• Part 2: Building minicli: Implementing Command Controllers [ minicli v.0.1.2 ]
• Part 3: Building minicli: Autoloading Command Namespaces [ minicli v.0.1.3 ]
• Part 4: Introducing minicli: a microframework for CLI-centric PHP applications

Note: Minicli has evolved a lot since that series was initially written, but that was the base for what Minicli is today.

• Dolphin - a CLI tool for managing DigitalOcean servers with Ansible.