README

A retro-flavored CLI styling toolbox for the modern terminal artisan.

Boxer is a Symfony Console-compatible helper package that adds stylistic and interactive output methods. It provides drop-in enhancements over Symfony Style and Formatter helper classes, allowing CLI applications to display consistently styled banners, block messages, and boxed outputs.

Features

• Colored and styled output blocks (box, slider, banner)
• Seamless integration with Symfony\Component\Console\Style\SymfonyStyle
• Drop-in replacement with fallback to default Symfony behavior i.e., by --boxless option
• Minimal configuration
• Sample usage file included

Why Boxer?

Symfony’s Console component is powerful but lacks modern, styled outputs by default. Boxer enhances CLI UX without complicating your codebase.

Requirements

• Composer installed globally, or use DDEV where Composer is pre-installed
• PHP 8.2 or higher (can optionally be run via DDEV with pre-installed one)
• symfony/console ^6.1 || ^7.0
• symfony/var-dumper ^6.0 || ^7.0

Installation

Fastest, via Composer

composer require biesior/boxer

Usage Example

A sample usage file is available at examples/boxer-style.php. You can run it with:

php examples/boxer-style.php

This example demonstrates:

• Block output with various styles
• Interactive questions
• Banners and progress bars

Quick Start with DDEV (optional)

For quick experimentation, the package includes a minimal .ddev/ config. If you have DDEV installed:

ddev start
ddev php examples/boxer-style.php

No need to configure PHP or Composer locally — it's ready to run in seconds.

Contributors Welcome!

This project is contributor-friendly!

Boxer is currently in ALPHA stage. Your feedback and contributions are valuable before the first stable release.

If you're a:

• Developer
• CLI tools maintainer
• UX-minded engineer
• Tester
• Technical writer
• Visionary

...we’d love to hear from you. Pull requests, issues, and suggestions are all welcome!

License

This package is open-sourced under the MIT license.
See the LICENSE file for details.

© Copyright 2025 Marcus biesior Biesioroff and contributors.