Undercover code—supporting PHP with non-web tools

Many web applications need some sort of support system that functions outside of the normal HTTP-based infrastructure. Sometimes, you simply need to schedule a job that runs at certain times of the day (with cron), but other, more resource-intensive operations, might require you to push operations out to a cluster of cloud servers (with gearman). From creating daemons with supervisord or jobs that run in inetd without any user-facing socket code, to processing inbound mail with PHP, we'll cover a broad spectrum of tools that you can place in your mental toolbox.