piwik-on-the-command-line.md

category
Develop

Commands

Piwik can be used through several interfaces, the command line being one of them.

The CLI console lets user run commands defined by plugins. Those commands can be used to perform maintenance, to monitor the application, to ease development…

The console tool

To use Piwik on the command line, all you need to do is run the console tool. The tool is a script located in Piwik's root directory and called console. You can run it with the command:

./console help

or

php ./console help

The Piwik console is built using the Symfony Console component. If you are familiar with Symfony, you should immediately find your way in the Piwik console.

Commands

The console can be used to run Piwik commands like so:

./console <command>

The console contains commands that generate empty plugins and plugin files, run git commands, watch Piwik's log output, run tests, deal with Piwik translations, …

You can view the entire list of commands by running the following command:

./console list

To get more information about a single command (such as what arguments it takes), run the following command:

./console help <command>

where <command> should be replaced with the command you are interested in.

Adding new commands

Plugins can extend the command line tool by creating their own commands. To do so you can use the CLI itself:

./console generate:command --pluginname=MyPlugin

This will create a folder named Commands within your plugin along with a PHP file which represents the actual command. You can add an unlimited number of commands to a plugin.

To learn how you can write your command, read the Symfony Console documentation.