Trying Eloquent artisan commands outside laravel.

In my last blog post, we had a look at using Eloquent outside laravel. One of the great things about Eloquent is Migrations. It’s like a version control for your database schema. Laravel comes with this useful command line tool called artisan, which makes it easy to make and run migrations. Since I was using Eloquent outside laravel, I had this (crazy) idea of trying to use the migration artisan commands along with it (i.e outside laravel).

Setup

Eloquent suggests installing illuminate\console and illuminate\filesystem to run the migration commands. So I update my composer.json accordingly and installed the requierd packages.

I made a file called artsy and put the following content in it:

<?php
require_once "vendor/autoload.php";
use Symfony\Component\Console\Application;

$app = new Application("Artsy, little brother of Artisan", "1.0");

$app->run();

Including commands

My first aim was to add migrate:install and make:migrate commands which would insert required migration tables to the database and run migrations respectively. After going through the database component’s code, I realized that the components have a crazy dependency on each other and required a lot of boostrapping (which is obviously handled by Laravel internally). To ease this task a bit, I decided to use Pimple.

After a bit struggle, I finally figured out the dependencies and also that I’ll need to mock Illuminate\Foundation\Composer for make:migrate command. So I also included Mockery. And after all this my artsy file looked like this:

<?php
require_once "vendor/autoload.php";

use Symfony\Component\Console\Application;
use Illuminate\Database\Console\Migrations;
use Pimple\Container;

$container = new Container();

$container['migration-table'] = 'migration';

$container['db-config'] = [
    'driver'    => 'pgsql',
    'host'      => 'localhost',
    'database'  => 'dummy',
    'username'  => 'postgres',
    'password'  => 'postgres',
    'charset'   => 'utf8',
    'prefix'    => '',
    'schema'   => 'public'
];

$container['filesytem'] = function ($c) {
    return new \Illuminate\Filesystem\Filesystem;
};

$container['composer'] = function ($c) {
    $composer = Mockery::mock('Illuminate\Foundation\Composer');
    $composer->shouldReceive('dumpAutoloads');
    return $composer;
};

$container['connection'] = function ($c) {
    $manager = new \Illuminate\Database\Capsule\Manager();
    $manager->addConnection($c['db-config']);
    $manager->setAsGlobal();
    $manager->bootEloquent();
    return $manager->getConnection('default');
};

$container['resolver'] = function ($c) {
    $r = new \Illuminate\Database\ConnectionResolver(['default' => $c['connection']]);
    $r->setDefaultConnection('default');
    return $r;
};

$container['migration-repo'] = function ($c) {
    return new \Illuminate\Database\Migrations\DatabaseMigrationRepository($c['resolver'], $c['migration-table']);
};

$container['migration-creator'] = function ($c) {
    return new \Illuminate\Database\Migrations\MigrationCreator($c['filesytem']);
};

$container['migrator'] = function ($c) {
    return new Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migrator($c['migration-repo'], $c['resolver'], $c['filesytem']);
};

$container['install-command'] = function ($c) {
    $command = new Migrations\InstallCommand($c['migration-repo']);
    return $command;
};

$container['migrate-make-command'] = function ($c) {
    $command = new Migrations\MigrateMakeCommand($c['migration-creator'], $c['composer']);
    return $command;
};

$app = new Application("Foo", "1.0");
$app->add($container['install-command']);
$app->add($container['migrate-make-command']);

Now running on running php artsy, showed me:

Artsy, little brother of Artisan 1.0

Usage:
 [options] command [arguments]

Options:
 --help (-h)           Display this help message
 --quiet (-q)          Do not output any message
 --verbose (-v|vv|vvv) Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal output, 2 for more verbose output and 3 for debug
 --version (-V)        Display this application version
 --ansi                Force ANSI output
 --no-ansi             Disable ANSI output
 --no-interaction (-n) Do not ask any interactive question

Available commands:
 help              Displays help for a command
 list              Lists commands
make
 make:migration    Create a new migration file
migrate
 migrate:install   Create the migration repository

Everything looked good till now. But upon running php artsy migrate:install, I got the following error.

PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member function call() on null in E:\demo\vendor\illuminate\console\Command.php on line 115
PHP Stack trace:
PHP 1. {main}() E:\demo\artsy:0
PHP 2. Symfony\Component\Console\Application->run() E:\demo\artsy:48
PHP 3. Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRun() E:\demo\vendor\symfony\console\Symfony\Component\Console\Application.php:126
PHP 4. Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRunCommand() E:\demo\vendor\symfony\console\Symfony\Component\Console\Application.php:195
PHP 5. Illuminate\Console\Command->run() E:\demo\vendor\symfony\console\Symfony\Component\Console\Application.php:874
PHP 6. Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command->run() E:\demo\vendor\illuminate\console\Command.php:101
PHP 7. Illuminate\Console\Command->execute() E:\demo\vendor\symfony\console\Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command.php:253

Upon inspecting Command.php in illuminate\console package, I found that the follwing line (L115) was the culprit.

return $this->laravel->call([$this, $method]);

As you can see, a whole instance of laravel is required even for running a simple console command!!!!

I tried mocking it too but the command did not do anything as expected and I could not think of a way to do it (with my limited knowledge of PHP) without implementing the whole Illuminate\Contracts\Foundation\Application interface with 20+ methods.

Conclusion

Laravel components are not as flexible or should I say loosely couple as that of Symfony’s. I wish they had been, but I’m no Taylor Otwell.

This was me just trying out some crazy idea and trying to learn stuff. If any one of you know a better solution, I would really like to discuss it. You can leave a comment below or tweet me @_vkbansal

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