Symfony: Calling a custom command from inside a controller

Question

I couldn't find an answer to this.

Not sure if it's relevant to this issue, but my project runs on a Limactl VM in Ubuntu.

I am trying to call a custom command from inside my controller, but I can't make sense of the exception I get as it states that there are no commands defined in the app namespace, yet I can call them from the console just fine.

The command bin/console app:execute {slug} {command} works fine in the terminal, but not when I call it from my controller. Actually, it does the same when I try to run debug:twig.

Could it be that the working directory used is not pointed at the right location? If so, how do I do that and then does that Limactl VM matter in how I tackle this issue?

The method is this:

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Console\Application;

    protected function executeCommand(String $command,String $slug, KernelInterface $kernel)
    {
      $application = new Application($kernel);
      $application->setAutoExit(false);

      $input = new ArrayInput([
        'command' => "bin/console app:execute",
        'cmd' => $command,
        'slug' => $slug,
      ]);

      $output = new BufferedOutput();
      $application->run($input, $output);

      $content = $output->fetch();

      return $this->render('command_results/index.html.twig', [
        'output' => $content
      ]);
    }

This is the line from my dev.log:

[2023-08-25T15:14:27.095303+00:00] console.CRITICAL: Error thrown while running command "'bin/console app:execute'". Message: "There are no commands defined in the "bin/console app" namespace." {"exception":"[object] (Symfony\\Component\\Console\\Exception\\NamespaceNotFoundException(code: 0): There are no commands defined in the \"bin/console app\" namespace. at /Users/me/dev/runner/runner/vendor/symfony/console/Application.php:622)","command":"'bin/console app:execute'","message":"There are no commands defined in the \"bin/console app\" namespace."} {"uid":"c6e8985","file":"/Users//dev/runner/runner/vendor/symfony/console/EventListener/ErrorListener.php","line":48,"class":"Symfony\\Component\\Console\\EventListener\\ErrorListener","callType":"->","function":"onConsoleError"}

Thanks for any help or advice you can give me! And my apologies if this has actually been asked before and I'm just super blind.

Answer 1

I figured it out: By finding the command to execute using $application->find('command'); and setting that to a variable, I can use that instance to perform $commandInstance->run() and that's it!

Answer 2

Executing a command from a controller like this is very bad practice, and should only be used in specific use-cases (see note here: https://symfony.com/doc/current/console/command_in_controller.html).

If you have code that needs to run on both the command line and on the web, it's better to refactor it and create a "service" for it. So you can run that service from both the console and the controller.

Based on your code it seems that you want to run every possible command there is. In that case, it's probably better to use the symfony/process component. That will run your command in a subprocess (as a real command) and you are able to capture the output from it.

The reason for it is that symfony (and other maintainers) sometimes check if the command is run from the command line or not. By executing it using symfony/process it can distinguish that.