Playground is a command line tool for evaluating PHP packages from Packagist (via Composer) in the Boris PHP REPL.
Let's say you're looking for a better way to evaluate datetimes in your latest Web app, and you want to try, say, the jasonlewis/expressive-date package. You could add the package to your composer.json and fiddle with Expressive Date inside your MVC framework of choice, but that's a time-consuming task just to evalute a package. And there's a risk you accidentally commit the package to your Composer configuration, or, even worse, you accidentally leave a few package-dependent lines in your application logic.
Couldn't it be easier? Playground leverages the power of Composer package management with the easy-of-use of the Boris REPL. Playground lets you download packages, autoload the package's classes, and launch a REPL in one line. If you decides to use the package(s), Playground can even generate a starter composer.json file for you.
Playground is available for download as a Phar archive. Simply download playground.phar and run it:
$ curl -L -O https://github.com/jacobbudin/playground/releases/download/v1.0.0/playground.phar
$ chmod +x playground.phar
$ ./playground.phar
From the command line, run like so:
$ playground monolog/monolog
You can also specify specific versions of packages:
$ playground monolog/monolog:1.6.*
And specify multiple packages:
$ playground monolog/monolog jasonlewis/expressive-date
Inside every REPL is a local variable $playground, which is a Playground instance with various helper methods. For example:
boris> $playground->saveComposer('composer.json'); // Saves composer.json file
boris> $playground->getPackages(); // Returns associative array of packages loaded, with version numbers
You can use Playground as an independent package via Packagist.org. You can rebuild the Phar archive using Box:
$ box build
Chris Corbyn (Boris), Nils Adermann & Jordi Boggiano (Composer), and the PHP Team
BSD 3-Clause (Revised) License