On the Laravel News site today there's a post introducing you to Tinker the command-line REPL (read-eval-print-loop) tool that integrates with the Laravel artisan command-line tool.

Laravel includes a powerful REPL, called Tinker, powered by the PsySH console by Justin Hileman under the hood. The tinker console allows you to interact with your Laravel application from the command line in an interactive shell.

Tinker used to be part of the laravel/framework package, but with the release of Laravel 5.4 is extracted into separate package.

They start the post by talking about what a REPL is and how it can be used to test things on the command line without needing to write up a full test script. They then show how to install the tool Tinker is based on globally (Psych) including a brief overview of how to use it. Next comes the Tinker-specific functionality including examples of the documentation commands, testing helpers and job execution features.