Something that comes up every so often in a sufficiently large PHP project is having to write helper scripts that run on the command line to complete various tasks. It might be periodically processing some images, updating cached analytics, etc. If the project is a Symfony project, it’s usually easy enough to add a Symfony task and be able to leverage the Symfony infrastructure to manage the individual “scripts” as tasks. This is equally true with Drupal, using Drush tasks to manage the individual scripts works well and lets you have a single, central spot for all your “helpers”. But what if its a vanilla PHP project or WordPress?
A technique I’ve started using is to create a class and then add each of the tasks as static functions. This allows you to keep all the tasks in one place, reuse code and configurations, and generally mimic how Symfony tasks and Drush work. From there, the file pulls off $argv to figure out what function to call and just passes $argv in as an argument as well.
Here’s a stub of a class to set something like this up: