Harness (PHP Version)

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harness is an orchestration engine library designed for PHP 8.4+, built to unify the execution, scheduling, and monitoring of major AI coding command-line interfaces (AI Coding CLIs) in Headless / Unattended Mode.

Through a unified PHP object-oriented interface, it abstracts away all discrepancies across Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, and OpenCode in command-line arguments, rule files, streaming output, Token billing, and skill distribution.

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🧐 Why Harness? (Core Problems Solved)

When automatically scheduling AI coding agents in automated pipelines, background task queues, CI/CD, or sandbox containers, developers typically face the following challenges:

1. Heterogeneous CLI arguments and execution modes:
   • Claude Code requires -p --output-format stream-json --permission-mode bypassPermissions
   • OpenAI Codex requires exec --json --sandbox danger-full-access
   • GitHub Copilot CLI requires -p --output-format json --autopilot --allow-all
   • OpenCode requires run --format json --auto
2. Inconsistent rules and instruction delivery standards:
   • Claude uses --system-prompt or CLAUDE.md;
   • Codex and OpenCode rely on AGENTS.md at the workspace root;
   • Copilot relies on .github/copilot-instructions.md.
3. Chaotic output stream formats that are difficult to standardize:
   • Disparate stdout/stderr and JSONL event structures across tools make it hard to uniformly capture thinking processes (Thinking), tool calls (Tool Use), and final results.
4. Inconsistent Token consumption and cost accounting standards:
   • Some CLIs output only token counts, while others output credit billing points, lacking a unified USD cost calculation model.
5. Divergent Agent Skills discovery and staging paths:
   • Different skill discovery paths (.claude/skills/, skills/, .github/skills/, .opencode/skill/).

harness standardizes and encapsulates all these underlying details, providing a consistent, reliable PHP API.

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🚀 Supported Backend CLIs

Backend (name)	Binary CLI	Default Model Example	Skill Discovery Path	Project Instruction File	Egress Allowed Hosts
claude	claude	claude-opus-4-6, claude-sonnet-4-6	.claude/skills/<name>	CLAUDE.md	*.anthropic.com
codex	codex	gpt-5.3-codex, deepseek-v4-pro	skills/<name>	AGENTS.md	api.openai.com, auth0.openai.com, chatgpt.com
copilot	copilot	gpt-5.6-sol, claude-sonnet-5	.github/skills/<name>	.github/copilot-instructions.md	github.com, api.github.com, *.githubcopilot.com
opencode	opencode	anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6	.opencode/skill/<name>	AGENTS.md	models.dev, api.openai.com, *.anthropic.com

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🧩 Key Features & Capabilities

• 🎯 Unified Driver Facade: Schedule any backend using a single Job entity and Runner::run() method, with support for custom models, thinking turns, reasoning effort, and more.
• ⚡ Standardized Event Stream:
  • EventKind::Thinking: AI deep thinking and reasoning process
  • EventKind::Tool: Tool and command invocation (e.g. bash, read, write, grep, etc.)
  • EventKind::Text: Regular text response from the model
  • EventKind::Result: Final settlement (including total cost costUSD, turns, and token usage breakdown usage)
  • EventKind::Session: Initial session ID (for breakpoint resumption)
  • EventKind::RateLimit: Rate limit/quota status and reset timestamp (ResetsAt)
  • EventKind::Error: Exceptions and error messages
• 💰 Unified Billing & Cost Accounting: Built-in pricing tables for major models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Copilot Hosted), automatically converting token metrics and Copilot nano-AIU into standardized USD costs.
• 🔄 Session Resumption (Resume): Automatically extracts Session IDs, supporting context continuation after interruptions or error corrections.
• 📦 Agent Skills Specification Support: Fully compatible with the Agent Skills Specification, providing SKILL.md YAML frontmatter parsing, parameter validation, and automated staging.
• 🛡️ Account Rate Limit & Quota Awareness: Automatically detects provider 429s, quota exhaustion, permission revocations, etc., and throws an AccountError containing the reset timestamp for retry scheduling.
• 🔒 Security Sandbox & Domain Whitelisting (Egress): One-click generation of Claude domain sandbox configuration (.claude/settings.json) to block unauthorized external network requests.

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📦 Requirements & Installation

• PHP >= 8.4
• Composer
• Docker (Recommended for local development with the dnmp-php84 container)

composer require tinywan/harness

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🛠️ Quick Start

1. Basic Headless Task Execution

<?php

/**
 * @desc Quick Start Example
 * @author Tinywan(ShaoBo Wan)
 * @date 2026/09/01
 */

declare(strict_types=1);

require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

use Harness\Harness;
use Harness\Job;
use Harness\Runner;
use Harness\Event;
use Harness\Exceptions\AccountError;

$workspace = '/path/to/project';

// 1. Get corresponding CLI backend (options: claude, codex, copilot, opencode)
$backend = Harness::byName('codex');

// 2. Build task configuration
$job = new Job(
    workspace: $workspace,
    srcDir: '.',
    prompt: 'Implement a function to parse CSV files and write unit tests for it.',
    model: 'gpt-5.3-codex',
    maxTurns: 20
);

// 3. Run and receive structured event stream in real-time
try {
    Runner::run($backend, $job, function (Event $event): void {
        // Output formatted log: [thinking], [tool], [text], [result], [rate-limit], [error]
        echo $event->format() . "\n";
    });
} catch (AccountError $e) {
    echo "Account quota / access limit error: " . $e->getMessage() . "\n";
    if ($e->resetAt !== null) {
        echo "Suggested retry time: " . $e->resetAt->format('Y-m-d H:i:s') . "\n";
    }
} catch (\Throwable $e) {
    echo "Execution failed: " . $e->getMessage() . "\n";
}

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2. Loading & Staging Agent Skills (SKILL.md)

use Harness\Skills\SkillParser;
use Harness\Skills\SkillDelivery;
use Harness\Harness;
use Harness\Job;
use Harness\Runner;
use Harness\Event;

// 1. Parse SKILL.md adhering to the Agent Skills specification
$skill = SkillParser::parse('/path/to/security-review/SKILL.md');

// 2. Select backend and configure job
$backend = Harness::byName('claude');
$job = new Job(
    workspace: '/path/to/project',
    srcDir: '.',
    skillName: $skill->name,
    model: 'claude-sonnet-4-6',
    outputFile: 'report.json'
);

// 3. Automatically stage the skill and associated dependencies into the backend discovery path
SkillDelivery::stage($backend, $job, $skill);

// 4. Run task
Runner::run($backend, $job, function (Event $event): void {
    echo $event->format() . "\n";
});

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3. Session Resume & Context Continuation

// Resume context using sessionID captured from a previous run
$resumeJob = new Job(
    workspace: '/path/to/project',
    srcDir: '.',
    resumeSessionID: '01a0626b-cb18-7e31-876b-7d40abe94431',
    resumePrompt: 'Please add handling for empty lines and BOM headers to the code just written.',
    model: 'gpt-5.3-codex'
);

Runner::run($backend, $resumeJob, function (Event $event): void {
    echo $event->format() . "\n";
});

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💡 Typical Use Cases

1. 🏢 Enterprise Automated Code Review & Security Scanning (Code Review & SAST)
   • Automatically spin up Claude Code or Codex in GitLab CI / GitHub Actions pipelines or Git Webhooks for headless PR scanning and output standardized JSON review reports.
2. 🤖 Automated Issue / Bug Fixing Agent Service
   • When a user submits an issue ticket, the background PHP Worker automatically creates an isolated sandbox, drives the AI CLI to locate bugs, modify code, run unit tests, and submit a PR via Git.
3. 📊 Multi-Model Capability Benchmarking & Arena Platform (AI Benchmark / Arena)
   • Concurrently invoke different AI CLIs against the same test suite via a unified interface, automatically comparing code generation quality, execution time, pass rates, and Token consumption costs.
4. ☁️ SaaS Platforms & AI Coding Middle-End Engine
   • Encapsulate headless AI coding agent capabilities into asynchronous jobs within web frameworks (Laravel / Webman / Symfony) and stream real-time events to the frontend via WebSocket.

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🧪 Pest Unit Testing

This project uses Pest 3.0 for comprehensive unit testing:

1. Run locally

composer test

2. Run inside Docker container (dnmp-php84)

composer run test:docker
# Or run directly via docker exec:
docker exec -w /var/www/ai/harness dnmp-php84 ./vendor/bin/pest

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🎨 Code Formatting & Linting (Mago)

This project is configured with Mago (a high-performance PHP toolchain written in Rust) via mago.toml:

# Code linting
mago lint

# Code auto-formatting
mago format

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📄 License

MIT License