Extbase on the command line

Note

This page is a work in progress. Content will be added as part of the Extbase documentation overhaul.

Commands are how an extension does work on a schedule or on demand: importing data, sending notifications, rebuilding derived records, cleaning up. Reusing the domain models and repositories an extension already has keeps that work expressed in the same terms as the rest of the extension.

The essentials:

A command runs without any request. None of the frontend TypoScript configuration Extbase normally reads has been built, and there is no site and no language.
The persistence layer is explicitly allowed to run without a request, so repositories can be used. Without configuration, though, Extbase has no storagePid to work with and queries fall back to searching page 0 alone. Ordinary records are stored on real pages, so a command typically finds nothing without explicit configuration.
The recursive setting that expands a storagePid down the page tree is applied while the configuration is resolved, which does not happen here. Setting a storagePid on the query settings therefore selects exactly the pages named, with no descendants. Expanding storagePids therefore is an explicit step as well. See Overriding the storagePid for a single query.
The rest of Extbase has a hard dependency on the request. Controllers, views and everything resolving plugin.tx_<extension> configuration cannot be used, and attempting it fails rather than degrading.
The language is not established either, and has to be chosen explicitly. See Setting the language explicitly.
Where a command only needs to read or write database rows, the database API does that without Extbase, and without anything to establish first.