pinker

 Laravel tinker desktop app tinkers with your any PHP applications.

This project is archived, please use Tinker 2 app instead.

Tinker with your laravel (php) application, a lite version of Tinkerwell app xD. It's can running on local or remote project (via SSH). If you want to know how pinker works, you can check out my blog post.

• MacOS (currently).
• Windows (not stable because i don't use Windows)

Download

This project is not developped anymore, please checkout new my Tinker2 app

Requirements

• php ^7.4

Installation

• Download build file
• Right click and select Open (This app is not signed).

How it works?

Pinker is just an laravel application embed in electron. To interactive with other php application, it's using psycho which is an wrapper of psysh.

Supported

• Laravel framework
• Plain project which using composer

More information of framework supporteds, pls check on psycho package.

Development

Setup

• clone project
• run bin/setup.sh

Packaging

• run npm run build

from bangnokia/pinker: Laravel tinker desktop app tinker with your any PHP applications.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How to "tinker" with any PHP applications

Do you know Tinkerwell app?

If you are a Laravel developer, I think you may be known software called Tinkerwell made by Marcel Pociot, the fast boy developer from Beyond Code, which helps you tinker with any PHP applications even on the local machine or remote server via SSH.

You know, the first impression, that was epic! What the hell is how it works? You should buy it.

How it works

I haven't bought the Tinkerwell or used it before (because US pricing isn't sweetly in my country xD), all the explanations in this blog post from some investigations about public resources of Tinkerwell and laravel-web-tinker

My first thought, was it must be something based on the artisan tinker command. So after digging into the Laravel tinker component, I see it's just a specific wrapper of PsySH - a runtime developer console, interactive debugger, and REPL for PHP. From row, the light is opened for us.

Bootstraps PHP application

First, we need to include the correct entry files of the application, which give you access to all the functions of the project. For more details, you should take a look at the configuration of PsySH.

For example, if a project is based on the composer, it is vendor/autoload.php. For Laravel is bootstrap/app.php, WordPress is wp-load.php, etc...

Executes PHP code

We have 2 problems to solve:

• Bootstrap for a project on the local machine.
• Bootstrap for a project on the remote server???

Including files on local machines is easy, but how can we include them on the remote server? The only action we can do is execute some commands via SSH.

Let's try to make a small binary file, we gonna upload it to the server, and of course, the file size must be small as possible. So I made a simple wrapper for PsySH and named it psycho, built using box, and the file size around ~600kb - ok fine :(. It's also using drivers to detect and properly bootstraps many kinds of PHP projects (actually 2).

The api is simple:

php psycho.phar --target=/project/root/path --code=somephpcode

My naming for classes in this package is stupid, and you should not use it.

Strategies

We need to install PHP on our machine.

On the local machine, we spawn a process and execute the psycho.phar.

On the remote server, we can upload psycho.phar to the /tmp/ directory and execute the command via SSH:

ssh user@remote.test "psycho command"

IMHO if we can open a background process and keep the connection of the ssh session then stream the out output, that's a better way than having ssh into the server every time we execute PHP code, but I don't know how to do it. If you know, please give me some clues :(.

Proof of Concept

I already made an electron app like Tinkerwell with base functions, and it works for me. It's called Pinker.

Pinker itself is a Laravel app, why? Because shipping the default Laravel project is convenient for quick prototyping some pieces of code, let's write it in Laravel. So the electron part help spawns php artisan serve and open the local URL. Thankfully Laravel Livewire crafted it up like a SPA, you know, easily and I don't like to write must javascript stuff.

So maybe you can try it or make your version if you are a hardcore and poor guy. My worse experience with Electron is file size after building ridiculous big (around ~90MB).

Conclusion

Again, this research is not how Tinkerwell works, all the plots came from my illusion. I just want to use some very basic functions on a daily basis.

To make an application like Tinkerwell need so much hard-working time, you should consider buying it for the best experience.

Thank you for reading my dummy explanations. Hope you guys enjoy it!

from How to "tinker" with any PHP applications | Blog of Nguyen