Crafting Hybrid PHP-Go CLIs with Symfony Console

Antonis Kalipetis, a staff engineer at Upsun, shared insights at SymfonyCon 2024 in Vienna about how his company successfully transitioned their PHP-based command-line interface (CLI) to a hybrid system incorporating Go, leveraging Symfony Console for consistent user experience. This move aimed to address three primary goals: maintaining backward compatibility with existing PHP commands, enhancing performance, and ensuring universal accessibility without requiring users to install PHP. The team embedded the legacy PHP code into a Go binary, allowing seamless execution of both old and new commands, which enabled a gradual migration path without disrupting existing workflows. The use of Go allowed for a single binary distribution, cross-platform compilation, and improved performance due to its lack of runtime dependencies. Despite the dual maintenance challenges, the transition facilitated better testing and code reusability, with plans for future improvements including enhanced authentication and a plugin system. The project serves as a testament to the effectiveness of hybrid approaches and the importance of prioritizing user experience while executing incremental changes.