Tinker

Ø Tinker is a REPL, or read–eval–print loop. If you’ve ever used IRB in Ruby, you’ll be familiar with how a REPL works.

Ø REPLs give you a prompt, similar to the command-line prompt, that mimics a “waiting” state of your application. You type your commands into the REPL, hit Return, and then expect what you typed to be evaluated and the response printed out.

Ø Example 7-13 provides a quick sample to give you a sense of how it works and how it might be useful. We start the REPL with php artisan tinker and are then presented with a blank prompt (>>>); every response to our commands is printed on a line prefaced with =>.

Example 7-13. Using Tinker                                                                                       

php artisan tinker

>>> $user = new App\User;

=> App\User: {}

>>> $user->email = 'matt@mattstauffer.co';

=> "matt@mattstauffer.co"

>>> $user->password = bcrypt('superSecret');

=> "$2y$10$TWPGBC7e8d1bvJ1q5kv.VDUGfYDnE9gANl4mleuB3htIY2dxcQfQ5"

>>> $user->save();

=> true

Ø As you can see, we created a new user, set some data, and saved it to the database. And this is real. If this were a production application, we would’ve just created a brand new user in our system.

Ø This makes Tinker a great tool for simple database interactions, for trying out new ideas, and for running snippets of code when it’d be a pain to find a place to put them in the application source files.

Ø Tinker is powered by Psy Shell, so check that out to see what else you can do with Tinker.