Reference

Command Line Tooling

Expressive offers a number of tools for assisting in project development. This page catalogues each.

Development Mode

The package zfcampus/zf-development-mode provides a simple way to toggle in and out of development mode. Doing so allows you to ship known development-specific settings within your repository, while ensuring they are not enabled in production. The tooling essentially enables optional, development-specific configuration in your application by:

  • Copying the file config/development.config.php.dist to config/development.config.php; this can be used to enable development-specific modules or settings (such as the debug flag).
  • Copying the file config/autoload/development.local.php.dist to config/autoload/development.local.php; this can be used to provide local overrides of a number of configuration settings.

The package provides the tooling via vendor/bin/zf-development-mode. If you are using the Expressive skeleton, it provides aliases via Composer:

$ composer development-enable
$ composer development-disable
$ composer development-status

Add settings to your development.*.php.dist files, and commit those files to your repository; always toggle out of and into development mode after making changes, to ensure they pick up in your development environment.

Expressive command-line tool

The package zendframework/zend-expressive-tooling provides the script vendor/bin/expressive, which contains a number of commands related to migration, modules, and middleware.

You can install it if it is not already present in your application:

$ composer require --dev zendframework/zend-expressive-tooling

Once installed, invoking the binary without arguments will give a listing of available tools:

$ ./vendor/bin/expressive

Integration with Composer

In the skeleton application, we provide direct integration with Composer, allowing you to invoke the tooling using:


$ composer expressive

You can use either that form, or invoke the script directly as detailed above.

Commands supported include:

  • action:create [options] <action>: This is an alias for the handler:create command detailed below.

  • factory:create [options] <class>: Create a factory for the named class. By default, the command will also register the class with its factory in the application container.

  • handler:create [options] <handler>: Create a request handler named after  <handler>. By default, the command will also generate a factory, register both with the application container, and, if a template renderer is discovered, generate a template in an appropriate location. Note: <handler> will either need to be quoted or the backslashes escaped. Example: handler:create "ModuleName\Handler\IndexHandler" or handler:create ModuleName\\Handler\\IndexHandler.

  • middleware:create <middleware>: Create a class file for the named middleware class. The class must use a namespace already declared in your application, and will be created relative to the path associated with that namespace.

  • migrate:interop-middleware [options]: Migrates former http-interop middleware under the src/ tree to PSR-15 middleware.

  • migrate:middleware-to-request-handler [options]: Migrates PSR-15 middleware under the src/ tree to PSR-15 request handlers; it will only migrate those that never call on their $handler argument.

  • module:create [--composer|-c] [--modules-path|-p] <module>: Create the named module including a filesystem skeleton, add and generate autoloading rules for it, and register the module's ConfigProvider with your application.

  • module:register [--composer|-c] [--modules-path|-p] <module>: Add and generate autoloading rules for the named module, and register the module's ConfigProvider with your application.

  • module:deregister [--composer|-c] [--modules-path|-p] <module>: Remove autoloading rules for the named module and regenerate autoloading rules; remove the module's ConfigProvider from the application configuration.

You may obtain full help for each command by invoking:

$ ./vendor/bin/expressive help <command>

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