The SitePoint blog has a new post from Daniel Gafitescu covering the use of the Symfony Console component to create command line PHP scripts quickly and easily.

As a PHP developer, you will often find yourself working with PHP in the command line. The first time I had to use it was because I would get the "Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded" error on a shared server where you could not change the max_execution_time PHP setting. Nowadays building command line scripts is much easier than it used to be. If you search on Packagist you will find a lot of packages to work with the command line but the one that stands out and is the most commonly used is Symfony/Console.

He starts with what you'll need to add to your Composer configuration to pull in a development version (2.4.x-dev) of the component. With that installed, he sets up a base directory ("/app") and a basic skeleton for your application. For his first command, he creates a script that will calculate the fibonacci numbers between two given numbers. He shows how to work with the input and Output objects inside the script and the code for the finished command - including some screenshots of the output.