I really like to write console commands for Symfony2 applications. There is something very cool about the Symfony Console Component which always makes me look for new things that I could do from the command line. A very simple command might look like this:

namespace Matthias\BatchProcessBundle\Command;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Command\ContainerAwareCommand;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Output\OutputInterface;

class BatchProcessCommand extends ContainerAwareCommand
{
    protected function configure()
    {
        $this->setName('matthias:batch-process');
    }

    protected function execute(InputInterface $input, OutputInterface $output)
    {
        // do something here

        ...
    }
}

Writing good, clean command classes can very problematic: you want to provide detailed output to the user, and tell him what is currently going on, what the result of some action was, or why something failed. You need the console output for this. It is an instance of OutputInterface and it is provided as the second argument of the command’s execute() method. The body of this method will usually look like this: