Welcome to the Cookbook

This section provides an introduction into CakePHP at the command-line. If you’ve ever needed access to your CakePHP MVC classes in a cron job or other command-line script, this section is for you.

PHP provides a powerful CLI client that makes interfacing with your file system and applications much smoother. The CakePHP console provides a framework for creating shell scripts. The Console uses a dispatcher-type setup to load a shell or task, and hand it its parameters.

A command-line (CLI) build of PHP must be available on the system if you plan to use the Console.

Before we get into specifics, let’s make sure we can run the CakePHP Console. First, you’ll need to bring up a system shell. The examples shown in this section will be in bash, but the CakePHP Console is Windows-compatible as well. Let’s execute the Console program from bash. This example assumes that the user is currently logged into a bash prompt and is currently at the root of a CakePHP installation.

You can technically run the console using something like this:

$ cd /my/cake/app_folder
$ ../cake/console/cake

But the preferred usage is adding the console directory to your path so you can use the cake command anywhere:

$ cake

Running the Console with no arguments produces this help message:

Hello user,
 
Welcome to CakePHP v1.2 Console
---------------------------------------------------------------
Current Paths:
 -working: /path/to/cake/
 -root: /path/to/cake/
 -app: /path/to/cake/app/
 -core: /path/to/cake/
 
Changing Paths:
your working path should be the same as your application path
to change your path use the '-app' param.
Example: -app relative/path/to/myapp or -app /absolute/path/to/myapp
 
Available Shells:
 
 app/vendors/shells/:
         - none
 
 vendors/shells/:
         - none
 
 cake/console/libs/:
         acl
         api
         bake
         console
         extract
 
To run a command, type 'cake shell_name [args]'
To get help on a specific command, type 'cake shell_name help'

The first information printed relates to paths. This is especially helpful if you’re running the Console from different parts of the filesystem.

Many users add the CakePHP Console to their system’s path so it can be accessed easily. Printing out the working, root, app, and core paths allows you to see where the Console will be making changes. To change the app folder you wish to work with, you can supply its path as the first argument to the cake command. This next example shows how to specify an app folder, assuming you’ve already added the console folder to your PATH:

$ cake -app /path/to/app

The path supplied can be relative to the current working directory or supplied as an absolute path.