New in Symfony 3.3: Improved command descriptors

December 22, 2016 Javier Eguiluz

Warning: This post is about an unsupported Symfony version. Some of this information may be out of date. Read the most recent Symfony Docs.

Contributed by
Roland Franssen
in #20866 and #20867.

One of the most unknown features of the Symfony Console commands is that they can provide alternative output formats, such as XML, JSON, Markdown, etc. For example, to get the Twig lint results in JSON format:

$ ./bin/console lint:twig app/Resources/ --format=json

[
    {
        "file": "app/Resources/views/base.html.twig",
        "valid": true
    },
    {
        "file": "app/Resources/views/blog/index.html.twig",
        "valid": true
    },
    ...
]

You can also get for example the information about any route in XML format:

$ ./bin/console debug:router homepage --format=xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<route name="homepage" class="Symfony\Component\Routing\Route">
  <path regex="#^/(?P&lt;_locale&gt;en|fr|de|es|cs|nl|ru|uk|ro|pt_BR|pl|it|ja|id|ca|sl)?$#s">/{_locale}</path>
  <defaults>
    <default key="_controller">FrameworkBundle:Template:template</default>
    <default key="template">default/homepage.html.twig</default>
    <default key="_locale">en</default>
  </defaults>
  <requirements>
    <requirement key="_locale">en|fr|de|es|cs|nl|ru|uk|ro|pt_BR|pl|it|ja|id|ca|sl</requirement>
  </requirements>
  <options>
    <option key="compiler_class">Symfony\Component\Routing\RouteCompiler</option>
  </options>
</route>

In Symfony 3.3 we improved some of these command descriptors. For example, when using JSON to describe an application, you'll now get the full name and version of the application:

{
    "application": {
        "name": "My Symfony application",
        "version": "v1.0"
    },
    "commands": [
        {
            "name": "help",
            "usage": [
                "help [--format FORMAT] [--raw] [--] [<command_name>]"
            ]
        },
        ...
    ]
}

In addition, when using Markdown as the output format, the contents will be formatted much better.

Before:

UNKNOWN
=======

* help
* list

help
----

* Description: Displays help for a command
* Usage:

  * `help [--format FORMAT] [--raw] [--] [<command_name>]`

...

After:

Console Tool
============

* `help`
* `list`

`help`
------

Displays help for a command

### Usage

* `help [--format FORMAT] [--raw] [--] [<command_name>]`

...

Help the Symfony project!

As with any Open-Source project, contributing code or documentation is the most common way to help, but we also have a wide range of sponsoring opportunities.

New in Symfony 3.3: Improved command descriptors symfony.com/index.php/blog/new-in-symfony-3-3-improved-command-descriptors

Tweet this

Comments

Michael COULLERET said on Dec 22, 2016 at 20:37 #1

Nice feature, thanks

Comments are closed.

To ensure that comments stay relevant, they are closed for old posts.