Magerun for Magento 2

At the end of October the second Yireo Magento 2 Seminar was held at Utrecht, the Netherlands. There were 2 tracks: one for developers and one for merchants. In these tracks each speaker had about 20 minutes to give their presentation which meant a lot of topics were covered. One of these talks was about Magerun2 presented by Christian Münch, Magento lead developer at @netz98 and creator of n98-magerun.

For those how do not know Magerun, it's a convenient command line tool for Magento developers, sysadmins and devops. And it's also easy to extend which gives you a ton of possibilities. Me and many of my colleagues use Magerun for Magento 1 in every single project.

Now I must say when I learned that Magerun was also available for Magento 2 I was sceptical at first. Magento 2 has a build in cli tool unlike Magento 1. Will Magerun still be as convenient that I will use it in all my projects as I do for Magento 1?

Lets begin by having a look at what cli commands Magento 2 delivers out of the box. To list all the available commands enter the following command in your Magento root.

bin/magento list

On a Magento 2 version 2.1.2 you get a bit over 60 commands. These will perform tasks like installing Magento, flushing caches, running indexes, showing dependencies between modules and many more.

After installing Magerun (it's easy, just follow their instruction), use the command below to list the available options. Unlike the Magento cli tool you can use the command in any location. It doesn't have to be in your Magento root.

n98-magerun2.phar list

With Magerun you have acces to about 60 extra commands on top of the the original Magento commands (which can also be used with Magerun)

During his talk, Christian Münch showed one command in particular which caught my attention:

n98-magerun2.phar dev:console

This will open an interactive shell with a Magento application initialised. You can use this to quickly test run some code. But you can also use it to generate controllers, models, blocks, etc. for your modules, including stubs for the methods!

For example, I have a module Phpro_Supplier (which you can also generate using Magerun) and I'd like to add a controller for the create action:

>>> module Phpro_Supplier
Use module Phpro_Supplier
Module: Phpro_Supplier >>> make:controller supplier.create
generated Controller/Supplier/Create.php

When I look in my Magento directory I'll find a new file app/code/Phpro/Supplier/Controller/Supplier/Create.php

And now you're all set to implement the action! I invite you to go look at the original presentation for more examples.

To conclude, after reviewing just a tiny bit of Magerun2 I'm certain that I'll use it in every single Magento 2 project.