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InitPHP Console — Wiki

Welcome to the official documentation for initphp/console — a small, dependency-free toolkit for writing command-line applications in PHP: command routing, typed arguments, coloured output, interactive prompts, and a styleable ANSI table renderer.

composer require initphp/console

#!/usr/bin/env php<?phprequire__DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
useInitPHP\Console\{Application, Input, Output};
$console = newApplication('Acme CLI', '1.0.0');
$console->register('greet', function (Input$input, Output$output) {
$output->writeln('Hello {name}!', ['name' => $input->getArgument('name', 'World')]);
}, 'Greets someone.');
$console->run();

php console.php greet --name=Ada # Hello Ada!
php console.php list # Overview of all commands

The building blocks

Type	Purpose
Application	The command registry and dispatcher.
Command	Base class for class-based commands.
Input / InputInterface	Parsed access to arguments, options and segments.
InputArgument	A typed, validated --name argument declaration.
Output / OutputInterface	Coloured writing, lists, progress bar and prompts.
Question	A value object describing an interactive question.
Helpers	Scalar value casting shared across the components.
Utils\Table	A styleable, multibyte-aware ASCII/ANSI table renderer.

Start here

• New to the package? Read Installation, then Quick Start.
• Building commands? See Commands, then Input and Input Arguments.
• Formatting output? Read Output; for prompts see Questions.
• Rendering tables? See Tables.
• Coming from initphp/cli-table? Read the Migration Guide.
• Looking for a specific method? The full API Reference lists every class member.

A note on terminology

This library splits the tokens after the command name into three buckets:

Token	Shape	Accessor
Argument	--name, --name=value	getArgument()
Option	-v, -abc, -key=value	getOption()
Segment	bare value, e.g. migrate	getSegment()

Here --long tokens are called arguments and -short tokens are called options — the opposite of some other CLI frameworks. Keep it in mind when porting code. See Input for the full grammar.

Package metadata

• License: MIT
• Minimum PHP: 7.2 (CI matrix runs 7.2 – 8.4)
• Runtime dependencies: none
• Optional extension: ext-mbstring (improves table alignment for UTF-8 values)
• Packagist: initphp/console
• Source: github.com/InitPHP/Console
• Issues: github.com/InitPHP/Console/issues
• Discussions: github.com/orgs/InitPHP/discussions
• Security: SECURITY.md

Since 2.1 this package also ships the table renderer formerly distributed as initphp/cli-table (now deprecated). The old class name keeps working via a class_alias — see Migration Guide.

If something in this wiki is unclear, ambiguous, or wrong, please open an issue — documentation fixes are reviewed eagerly.