How to create custom Artisan Commands

The following documentation is based on this tutorial I’ve created which will show you how to create two custom Artisan commands. The create:product command makes a new product, and the show:product command will interact with Eloquent to pull in all products from the database.

• Author: Code With Dary
• Twitter: @codewithdary
• Instagram: @codewithdary

Usage

Clone the repository

git clone git@github.com:codewithdary/custom-artisan-commands.git
cd custom-artisan-commands
composer install
cp .env.example .env 
php artisan key:generate
php artisan cache:clear && php artisan config:clear 
php artisan serve 

Database

Make sure that you have setup your database credentials correctly in the .env file since we’re going to pull in data from the database

mysql;
create database [DATABASE NAME];
exit;

Create a model & migration to interact with the database

php artisan make:model Product -m;

Open the products migration inside the /database/migrations folder and replace the up() method with

public function up()
{
    Schema::create('products', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->id();
        $table->string('title');
        $table->double('original_price');
        $table->tinyInteger('in_stock')->default(1);
        $table->tinyInteger('status')->default(0);
        $table->timestamps();
    });
}

Obviously, don't forget to migrate your tables :)

php artisan migrate

Create custom Artisan command

If you perform php artisan list inside the CLI, you’ll find a complete list of Artisan commands that you can perform. If you scroll up to the make section, you’ll see that the third command is make:command, which will create a new artisan command for you

Perform the following two commands to create two custom Artisan commands that we will be using in this tutorial

php artisan make:command CreateNewProduct
php artisan make:command ShowAllProducts

Or you can add the $signature property directly in the command

php artisan make:command CreateNewProduct --command=create:product
php artisan make:command ShowAllProducts --command=show:product

This will create a two classes inside the /app/Console/Commands folder called CreateNewProduct.php and ShowAllProducts.php. Let's focus on the CreateNewProduct.php file first

The $signature property will be the Artisan command that you need to run inside the CLI to use the command and the $description will be the description of the custom command. Let’s change it to the following

protected $signature = 'create:product';
protected $description = 'Create a new product through Artisan';

Since we’re not working with an interface but with the CLI, we got to make sure that we ask the user for product data. This can be done through the ask() method

Then, make sure that you import App\Models\Product since we’re going to use Eloquent to interact with our Products table

public function handle()
{
    $title = $this->ask('What is the product title?: ');
    $original_price = $this->ask('What is the product price?: ');
    $stock = $this->ask('Is the product in stock?: ');
    $status = $this->ask('What is the product status?: ');

    Product::create([
        'title' => $title,
        'original_price' => $original_price,
        'in_stock' => $stock,
        'status' => $status
    ]);
    
    $this->info('Product has been created!');
}

We have also created a new Custom artisan command inside /app/Console/Commands/ folder which will show all products from the Products table.

Make sure that you change up the $signature and the $description of the ShowAllProducts.php file to the following:

protected $signature = 'show:product';
protected $description = 'Show all products through Artisan';

Instead of printing the output as an array, we’re going to use the table() method to output a simple ASCII table full of your data

public function handle()
{
    $headers = ['id', 'title', 'original_price', 'in_stock', 'status', 'Created at', 'Updated at'];
    $data = Product::all()->toArray();
    $this->table($headers, $data);
}

Run the following command inside the CLI to grab all products from the database

php artisan show:product

Example output

+----+-----------+----------------+----------+--------+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| id | title     | original_price | in_stock | status | created_at                  | updated_at                  |
+----+-----------+----------------+----------+--------+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| 1  | iPhone    | 799            | 1       | 0       | 2021-07-29T12:58:28.000000Z | 2021-07-29T12:58:28.000000Z |
+----+-----------+----------------+----------+--------+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

Calling Artisan commands in normal code

There might be a case where you need to run your Artisan commands in either a controller of the web.php file. This can be done in two different ways. The easiest one, and in my opinion the most recommended one is using the Artisan Facade

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Artisan;

Then inside your code, you can either use Artisan::call() or the Artisan::queue(). Both methods take one required and one optional parameter
• First parameter will be the terminal command [REQUIRED]
• Second parameter will be an array of parameters to pass it [OPTIONAL]

Artisan::call('show:product');
Artisan::queue('show:product');

Credits due where credits due…

Thanks to Laravel for giving me the opportunity to make this tutorial on Artisan Console.