Top Level n98-magerun Commands

This article is part of a longer series covering the n98-magerun power tool

N98-magerun commands are organized in a tree hierarchy. For example, the

extension:list

command is actually the list command, under the top level category extension. These categories don’t tie back to any particular Magento system. Instead, they exist to help end users (you) find the commands, as well as discover other commands they may not have known about.

Today we’re going to look at the “top level” commands. These are commands that don’t exist in any category. Here’s the command descriptions from the built-in help.

help                             Displays help for a command

install                          Install magento

list                             Lists commands

mysql-client                     Opens mysql client by database config from
                                 local.xml

open-browser                     Open current project in browser
                                 (experimental)

self-update                      Updates n98-magerun.phar to the latest
                                 version.

selfupdate                       Updates n98-magerun.phar to the latest
                                 version.

shell                            Runs n98-magerun as shell

uninstall                        Uninstall magento (drops database and
                                 empties current folder

Meta Commands

The help command grants you access to built-in documentation for each n98-magerun command.

$ n98-magerun.phar help [command name]

This help will give you a (very) brief description of the command, as well as list any extra arguments the command accepts. This should be your first stop if you have any questions about a particular command

Similar to the help command, the list command will list out all possible n98-magerun commands

$ n98-magerun.phar list

This list is similar (or identical) to the default output of n98-magerun running with no paramaters. It’s worth breezing through this list to see what sort of things n98-magerun can do.

Finally, the self-update and selfupdate commands can be used to update your n98-magerun phar archive itself.

$ n98-magerun.phar selfupdate

This update process will use the versions.txt in the netz98 github account to determine if you’re up to date, and if not the latest n98-magerun.phar will be downloaded automatically, replacing your existing version.

Utility Commands

The shell command allows you to run n98-magerun as a CPAN like shell

$ n98-magerun.phar shell
n98-magerun > help

Usage:
 help [--xml] [command_name]

Arguments:
 command               The command to execute
 command_name          The command name (default: "help")

etc ...    

This can be useful if you wish to run several commands in sequence, or are exploring the commands offered by the system.

The mysql-client command will open a command line mysql browser and automatically connect to the Magento system you’re currently browsing (remember, n98-magerun requires you to run “cd-ed” into a Magento directory). If you work with multiple Magento system you’ll see how this helps prevent the “I was using the wrong database” problem.

Similarly, the open-browser command lets you automatically open a web browser window to the current Magento system. In addition to grabbing the base URL from the configuration, this command lets you automatically change to a specific store view by providing its ID or code as an argument

$ n98-magerun.phar open-browser 1
$ n98-magerun.phar open-browser default

or selecting from an interactive menu

$ n98-magerun.phar open-browser
[1] default - English
[2] french - French
[3] german - German
Please select a store: 

Installation Commands

The install command provides a command line interface for installing Magento. While install contains many command line flags for scripting installations (use the help command to see them all), where it really shines is the interactive shell program that will walk you through an entire installation

$ n98-magerun.phar install

  Magento Installation  

[1]  magento-ce-1.6.2.0
[2]  magento-ce-1.7.0.2
[3]  mageplus-master
[4]  magento-mirror-1.4.2.0
[5]  magento-mirror-1.5.1.0
[6]  magento-mirror-1.6.2.0
[7]  magento-ce-2.0.0.0-dev (experimental)
Choose a magento version:    

Running the install command with no arguments will kick off a shell program that downloads a version of Magento to your computer, and collects the information needed to perform a command line install using the install.php script that ships with Magento. This command will perform all the needed Magento tasks for an installation — you’ll still need to install a version of MySQL, and expose Magento to a web server (Apache, Nginx, etc.) yourself.

Finally, the uninstall command can be used to remove a Magento installation from your machine. Personally, with hard drive space being cheap and access to a site only a simple sudo apachectl graceful away, I’m not a fan of a destructive command like uninstall. However, if you’re less conservative than I am, uninstall is there if you need it.