initialising PHP interactive

Question

I often find PHP's interactive mode -- php -a -- very useful but it would be far more useful if I could start it and have a few commands executed right away to initialize my environment. Things like run the autoloader, setup a few use shortcuts for namespaces, etc.

Here's an example:

include "../../autoloader.php";
use App/Foo/Bar as Bar;

I thought maybe I could just add these lines to a text file initialize.txt and then start the interactive mode with php -a < initialize.txt but that didn't work.

Anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

As Tomas Creemers mentioned, you have to use auto_prepend_file PHP flag to auto-require a file. For example:

<?php
# foo.php
function bar() { print "Bar.\n"; }

You can load PHP interpreter like this:

[hron@merlin tmp ] $ php -d auto_prepend_file=$PWD/foo.php -a
Interactive shell

php > bar();
Bar.
php >

Or you can include file manually:

[hron@merlin tmp ] $ php -a
Interactive shell

php > include 'foo.php';
php > bar();
Bar.
php >