Executing Shell Commands In Laravel

Both shell_exec() and exec() do the job - until they don't.

If your command crash for some reason, you won't know - shell_exec() and exec() don't throw Exceptions. They just fail silently. 😱

So, here is my solution to encounter this problem:

use Symfony\Component\Process\Process; class ShellCommand { public static function execute($cmd): string { $process = Process::fromShellCommandline($cmd); $processOutput = ''; $captureOutput = function ($type, $line) use (&$processOutput) { $processOutput .= $line; }; $process->setTimeout(null) ->run($captureOutput); if ($process->getExitCode()) { $exception = new ShellCommandFailedException($cmd . " - " . $processOutput); report($exception); throw $exception; } return $processOutput; } } 

It utilises Symfony's Process (which comes out of the box to Laravel). ✨

With this way, I can throw a custom exception, log the command and the output to investigate, report it to my logs to investigate, etc.

No more failing silently 😇

Hope you like this little piece! If you do, please give it a ❤️