On perlmonks today, a user was needing to maintain a PHP app, and wanted to know what the PHP equivalent of perl -wc script.pl was — specifically, they wanted to know how to run a PHP script from the commandline and have it display any warnings (ala perl's strict and warnings pragmas).

Unfortunately, there's not as simple a way to do this in PHP as in perl. Basically, you need to do the following:

• To display errors:

  • In your php.ini file, set display_errors = On, or
  • In your script, add the line ini_set('display_errors', true);

• To show notices, warnings, errors, deprecation notices:

  • In your php.ini file, set error_reporting = E_ALL | E_STRICT, or
  • In your script, add the line error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);

Alternatively, you can create a file with the lines:

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);
ini_set('display_errors', true);

and then set the php.ini setting auto_prepend_file to the path to that file.

NOTE: do not do any of the above on a production system! PHP's error messages often reveal a lot about your applications, including file layout and potential vectors of attack. Turn display_errors off on production machines, set your error_reporting somewhat lower, and log_errors to a file so you can keep track of what's going on on your production system.

The second part of the question was how to run a PHP script on the command line. This is incredibly simple: php myscript.php. No different than any other scripting language.

You can get some good information by using some of the switches, though. -l turns the PHP interpreter into a linter, and can let you know if your code is well-formed (which doesn't necessarily preclude runtime or parse errors). -f will run the script through the parser, which can give you even more information. I typically bind these actions to keys in vim so I can check my work as I go.

If you plan on running your code solely on the commandline, add a shebang to the first line of your script: #!/path/to/php. Then make the script executable, and you're good to go. This is handy for cronjobs, or batch processing scripts.

All of this information is readily available in the PHP manual, and the commandline options are always available by passing the --help switch to the PHP executable. So, start testing your scripts already!