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.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted by i>Miguel Ibarra Romero showing how to use the PsySH tool to do some interactive debugging of your PHP applications via both the command line and a web frontend.

It’s 1:00 a.m., the deadline for your web application’s delivery is in 8 hours… and it’s not working. As you try to figure out what’s going on, you fill your code with var_dump() and die() everywhere to see where the bug is. [...] Is this situation familiar to you? PsySH to the rescue. PsySH is a Read-Eval-Print Loop (or REPL). You may have used a REPL before via your browser’s javascript console. If you have, you know that it possesses a lot of power and can be useful while debugging your JS code.

He walks you through the install via Composer and some of the basic commands and syntax for executing PHP code inside its shell. Command line testing is good, but debugging full applications is a bit more difficult. He shows how to integrate the tool into a sample application that calls PsySH via a "debug" call and output via a set of "window" objects. He also includes a bit close to the end about debugging with unit tests, executing them from inside the shell as well.

Allan MacGregor introduces you to Psych in his latest post today. Psysh is a runtime developer console, interactive debugger and REPL for PHP.

Psysh is actually more than a simple REPL it's also an interactive debugger; which means you can say goodbye to the endless barrage of var_dump() and die() statements. But do we really need another REPL for PHP, well honestly we could probably get by with the solutions currently available however Psysh has an extremely interesting Ace under the sleeve, it can also function as a realtime debugger.

He includes a few terminalcasts showing some of the commands Psysh offers from the expected output of variable value out to a handy link to the PHP documentation. An example of the useful object output is also included, enabling the showing of methods and properties.

On PHPMaster.com today Shameer C has a new tutorial introducing you to Boris, a REPL (read-eval-print loop tool) that's a bit more enhanced than the basic PHP interactive shell.

As web developers, we know the importance of the JavaScript console provided by the browser in testing out code snippets. We don’t need to write an entire HTML page and JavaScript code just to verify the functioning or logic of a small routine we wrote. Instead, we simply run the expressions in the console and immediately see the results. Similarly, a REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) is the console of a programming language in which we can write code line-by-line and see what it does. [...] PHP’s REPL is very good in what it does, although it does have some limitations. [...] And so, Boris tries to solve these problems and other concerns as well.

He walks you through the installation (via a git clone and, later, through Composer) and shows how to run it as well as some sample output. He also shows how to make a custom command-line Boris runner and how to embed it into your application. His example of a tool that would benefit from this is a command-line web service client using Boris and Guzzle.