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.
- 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
--boxlessoption - Minimal configuration
- Sample usage file included
Symfony’s Console component is powerful but lacks modern, styled outputs by default. Boxer enhances CLI UX without complicating your codebase.
- Composer installed globally, or use DDEV where Composer is pre-installed
PHP 8.2or higher (can optionally be run via DDEV with pre-installed one)symfony/console^6.1 || ^7.0symfony/var-dumper^6.0 || ^7.0
composer require biesior/boxerA sample usage file is available at examples/boxer-style.php. You can run it with:
php examples/boxer-style.phpThis example demonstrates:
- Block output with various styles
- Interactive questions
- Banners and progress bars
For quick experimentation, the package includes a minimal .ddev/ config. If you have DDEV installed:
ddev start
ddev php examples/boxer-style.phpNo need to configure PHP or Composer locally — it's ready to run in seconds.
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!
This package is open-sourced under the MIT license.
See the LICENSE file for details.
© Copyright 2025 Marcus biesior Biesioroff and contributors.