Knowing dev from prod in a cakePHP shell

I wrote a cakePHP shell to synchronize an IMAP mailbox with a mysql table. I wanted to test my shell on local first, then upload it and make a CRON job of it.

Whenever I tried to run the shell from my development environment I was greeted with various "Database table is missing" messages.

After some digging, it occurs that the shell was connecting to my prod database, not the dev one.

The culprit

I wrote a little snippet to automatically switch to the correct database based on the current server name. If it was localhost, I used the $dev credentials, while keeping the $default credentials for other cases (ie. production).

This worked great and I added this little code to my database.php file.

But when running a shell, the env('SERVER_ADDR') was empty, thus my test was always selecting the prod database.

I couldn't find anyway to guess if I was running a shell from prod or dev. I sure had access to a lot of config informations through env and $_SERVER but none seemed to be enough to guess the correct environment.

Solution

I finally decided that the only way was to manually pass a flag to my shell call to tell if it was to use the dev or prod credentials.

I decided that adding a dev arg to the shell call will switch to dev mode, while not adding it will use production mode.

My final shell call looked like :

cake -app "path/to/app" mail_import dev

And I added the following logic in my database switching logic :

// Defining the Environment (prod or dev)
if (defined('CAKEPHP_SHELL')) {
  // Based on the prod/dev flag
  $args = env('argv');
  $environment = 'prod';
  foreach($args as $flag) {
    if ($flag=='dev') {
      $environment = 'dev';
      break;
    }
  }
} else {
  // Based on the server url
  $environment = (env('SERVER_ADDR')=='127.0.0.1') ? 'dev' : 'prod';
}

Note that I checked if the script was accessed through normal server/php delegation or through the CLI using defined('CAKEPHP_SHELL')

Tags : #bash, #cakephp, #cli, #console, #database, #shell

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