Minion

Minion is a module for the Kohana framework which allows you to run various tasks from the cli.

The main purpose of minion is to run database migrations, but it exposes a useful framework for creating additional tasks.

The system is inspired by ruckusing, which was in turn inspired by rake.

Getting Started

First off, download and enable the module in your bootstrap

Then you can run minion like so:

php index.php --uri=minion/{task}

To view a list of minion tasks, run

php index.php --uri=minion/help

To view help for a specific minion task run

php index.php --uri=minion/help/{task}

For security reasons Minion will only run from the cli. Attempting to access it over http will cause a Request_Exception to be thrown.

Writing your own tasks

All minion tasks must be located in classes/minion/task/. They can be in any module, thus allowing you to ship custom minion tasks with your own module / product.

Each task must extend the abstract class Minion_Task and implement Minion_Task::get_config_options() and Minion_Task::execute(). See Minion_Task for more details.

Documentation

Code should be commented well enough not to need documentation, and minion can extract a class' doccomment to use as documentation on the cli.

Testing

This module is unittested using the unittest module. You can use the minion group to only run minion tests.

i.e.

phpunit --group minion

License

This is licensed under the same license as kohana

FAQ

Can't I just create my own controllers instead of creating "tasks"

Yes, controllers offer just as much control as tasks, however there are a number of advantages to tasks:

• They can only be run via command line or through code (see note about http)
• All the groundwork for interacting with the user on the command line is already in place, you just need to take advantage of it
• It provides a uniform way to access and perform tasks on the command line, rather than creating an elaborate collection of controllers while trying to restrict access to them. If you create a module that requires command line interaction then you just ship a minion task with it and users will be able to start using it with minimal setup & configuration