Spark: Ignite your development workflow

Spark is a utility to help with everything from various mundane tasks to complex database migrations and project deployment.

Installation

Download spark.phar and make it executable. If desired, alias spark=spark.phar. You may also want to alias sparksh='spark repl'.

Using Spark

Spark expects a configuration file to either be found at ./.spark.json or ./.spark/spark.json relative to the project root. The ./.spark directory will always be used for auxillary configuration, so the placement is fully up to you.

On its own it doesn't do much except provide a command interface to its inside. The magic can be found in preloading:

spark.json

{
  "preload": [ "./.spark/plugins/*", "./.spark/autoload.php" ]
}

The preloader will go over each of the defined rules and attempt to load them in one of two ways, if applicable:

1. Files with a .php-extension will be loaded directly.
2. Directories having a sparkplug.php file will be loaded as plugins.

The advantages of writing your extensions as flat files:

• Simple interface
• Quickly register resources for other parts of Spark
• All code evaluated on load (can be a caveat!)

The advantage of writing your extensions as plugins:

• Object-oriented interface
• Delayed evaluation of code, ensuring dependencies are loaded

Scripts

Using scripts is the simplest way to leverage Spark:

spark.json

{
  ...
  "scripts": {
    "hello": "./.spark/hello.php",
    "world": "echo 'World'",
    "greet": [
      "@hello",
      "@world"
    ]
  }
}

.php-files are executed in-process, and as such have access to any registered resources, resource types and plugins.

Resources

Resources are wrappers around database connections and such, providing a cleaner interface to its innards.