# Short guide for building beautiful commands with Laravel Prompts

## 🔍 Overview

Laravel Prompts is a PHP package for adding beautiful and user-friendly forms to your command-line applications, with browser-like features including placeholder text and validation. It is perfect for accepting user input in your Artisan console commands, but it may also be used in any command-line PHP project.

[**Laravel Prompts**](https://laravel.com/docs/prompts) was introduced by [**Jess Archer**](https://jessarcher.com/) at [**Laracon US**](https://laracon.us/) on July 19, 2023, and is now a built-in part of the framework. It is easy to use and can be added to your existing Artisan commands with just a few lines of code.

## 🚀 Installation

Laravel Prompts only requires the package to be installed. There’s no configuration file or service provider to publish.

```bash
composer require laravel/prompts
```

By installing using Composer, we can start building prompts for your Artisan commands.

## 🔨 Basic usages

If you've ever created your own Artisan commands, you'll see how easy it is to use Laravel Prompts.

Let's create a new command for this tutorial:

```bash
php artisan make:command MakeCoffeeCommand
```

In the old way of writing Artisan commands, we would write like this example:

```php
namespace App\Console\Commands;

use App\Models\Coffee;
use Illuminate\Console\Command;

class MakeCoffeeCommand extends Command
{
    protected $signature = 'make:coffee';

    protected $description = 'Make some delicious coffee ☕';

    public function handle()
    {
        $name = $this->ask('What type of coffee would you like? (espresso, drip, etc.)');
	  
        …
    }
}
```

You can use the functions Laravel Prompts provides and enjoy an improved output:

```php
namespace App\Console\Commands;

use App\Models\Coffee;
use Illuminate\Console\Command;
use function Laravel\Prompts\text;

class MakeCoffeeCommand extends Command
{
    protected $signature = 'make:coffee';

    protected $description = 'Make some delicious coffee ☕';

    public function handle()
    {
        $coffeeType = text('What type of coffee would you like? (espresso, drip, etc.)');
	    
        Coffee::create(compact('coffeeType'));

        $this->info("We made for you some $name coffee!");
    }
}
```

Here’s a screenshot of the command in action.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1695294532490/0ca8ade8-0cf9-4f11-a346-76f5e837baed.jpeg align="center")

## **📍** Multi-select support

Let’s go even further and add type selection:

```php
$types = multiselect(
    label: 'What type of coffee would you like',
    options: [
        'Light roast', 
        'Medium roast', 
        'Dark roast', 
        'French roast', 
        'Italian roast',
        'Espresso roast'
    ],
    scroll: 6,
    required: true,
    validate: function (array $values) {
	    return ! in_array(count($values), [1, 2])
            ? 'A maximum of two roast levels can be assigned to make coffee.'
            : null;
	}
);
```

* Have the 6 possible roast types as options.
    
* The prompt is required to have an answer.
    
* We display 6 choices at once.
    
* We ensure that 1 or 2 types can be assigned.
    
* We leverage PHP’s named arguments to keep our code informative and omit some arguments.
    

Here’s how the refreshed Artisan command using Laravel Prompts looks:

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1695301385864/3a15c179-96d7-429f-bc13-36236fc27360.jpeg align="center")

## **📍** Searching for elements

Laravel Prompts allows you to have a lot of options for the entity to select from, the `search` function allows the user to type a search query to filter the results before using the arrow keys to select an option:

```php
use function Laravel\Prompts\search;
 
$name = search(
    'Search for coffee type...',
    fn (string $coffeeType) => strlen($coffeeType) > 0
        ? Coffee::where('name', 'like', "%{$coffeeType}%")->pluck('name')->all()
        : []
);
```

Cool, right?!

## **📍** Adding a loading animation (spinner)

Laravel Prompts lets you use a beautiful loading animation, effortlessly. Just as with the rest of the API, it’s as simple as calling the `spin()` function. It serves to indicate ongoing processes and returns the callback's results upon completion:

```php
use function Laravel\Prompts\spin;
 
$response = spin(
    fn () => Http::get('http://coffees.com'),
    'Fetching coffees...'
);
```

The spin function needs the [pcntl PHP extension](https://www.php.net/manual/fr/book.pcntl.php) to work. If you don't have it, you'll see a static spinner instead.

Now that you know the basics of [Laravel Prompts](https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/prompts#informational-messages), you can read the easy-to-understand documentation to learn more.

## 🤔 **Contribute to Laravel Prompts**

If you find a bug or think Laravel Prompts needs a new feature, you can send a pull request to the official repository: [**https://github.com/laravel/prompts**](https://github.com/laravel/prompts)