Control your Machines with PHP (CLI Made Easy)

PHP has come a long way since its humble origins as a collection of web page scripts. It is now a modern and fully capable general purpose language that is just as capable as Ruby, Perl or Python.

To get the most out of this talk, bring your laptop (Mac OSX, Linux or even Windows - works better with a linux vm) with a current version of PHP installed and your remote server's SSH and database credentials.

After covering some basic theory we are going to dive in by installing the necessary software on your machine so we all have a cross-platform PHP command line environment. We will use your existing PHP skills to write some basic scripts to automate common tasks (like clearing out old files from a directory), learn how to write a system daemon that is always running in the background waiting for something to process, and how to use PHP to schedule recurring tasks without having to use cron or scheduler each time. We will then learn a secure way to connect to your remote server (abstracted SSH) and execute a combination of PHP and bash scripts remotely. We will save some future time and headaches by automating a database back up that we pull back to our local machine.

And finally, we will wrap up with some fun by interacting with the real world by controlling an Arduino and/or Raspberry Pi with PHP.

PHP is much more capable than you realize. Let me show you!

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