How do I execute a PHP shell script as an Automator action on Mac OS X

Question

I'm tempted by Automator.app's ability to create contextual services in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I would like to create some keyboard accessible shortcuts to manipulate text snippets by calling a shell script. However, Automator only suggests bash, Perl, Python and Ruby (among others) to allow this. But, since PHP also ships with Mac OS (and, to be honest, it's the only scripting language I fully master), I wonder why I can't run a PHP shell script.

Answer 1

dbr's solution above is excellent, but I found that it didn't work for me, perhaps due to a later change in the shell, php, or OS version (I'm using OS X 10.8). After a lot of head-scratching I found that the answer is to quote the heredoc marker.

A useful addition is to use the appropriate syntax to pass the arguments through to the php script. Putting all that together, I'm using:

php -- "$@" <<'EOF'
<?php 
print_r( $argv );
?>
EOF

Answer 2

The list of shells that Automator supports is in

 /System/Library/Automator/Run\ Shell\ Script.action/Contents/Resources/Shells.plist

You can follow this guy's instructions to add an entry for /usr/bin/php. You may want to copy the .action file to ~/Library/Automator first, and work on the copy instead.

Of course, it's probably easier to just wrap it in a bash script, as others have suggested.