Setting up the CLI tool on Unix-like Systems

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The most common setup in the *nix environment, is to copy the zf.sh and zf.php into the same directory as your PHP binary. This can generally be found in one of the following places:

/usr/bin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/local/ZendServer/bin/
/Applications/ZendServer/bin/

To find out the location of your PHP binary, you can execute 'which php' on the command line. This will return the location of the PHP binary you will be using to run PHP scripts in this environment.

The next order of business is to ensure that Zend Framework library is set up correctly inside of the system PHP include_path. To find out where your include_path is located, you can execute php -i and look for the include_path variable, or more succinctly, execute php -i | grep include_path. Once you have found where your include_path is located (this will generally be something like /usr/lib/php, /usr/share/php, /usr/local/lib/php, or similar), ensure that the contents of the /library/ directory are put inside your include_path specified directory.

Once you have done those two things, you should be able to issue a command and get back the proper response like this:

If you do not see this type of output, go back and check your setup to ensure you have all of the necessary pieces in the proper place.

There are a couple of alternative setups you might want to employ depending on your servers configuration, your level of access, or for other reasons.

Alternative Setup involves keeping the Zend Framework download together as is, and creating a link from a PATH location to the zf.sh. What this means is you can place the contents of the ZendFramework download into a location such as /usr/local/share/ZendFramework, or more locally like /home/username/lib/ZendFramework, and creating a symbolic link to the zf.sh.

Assuming you want to put the link inside /usr/local/bin (this could also work for placing the link inside /home/username/bin/ for example) you would issue a command similar to this:

ln -s /usr/local/share/ZendFramework/bin/zf.sh /usr/local/bin/zf

# OR (for example)
ln -s /home/username/lib/ZendFramework/bin/zf.sh /home/username/bin/zf

This will create a link which you should be able to access globally on the command line.