I am coding on Windows, and sometimes, I need aliases, scripts and handy tools.

Trust me, if you start learning about windows batch, you will definitely be able to get closer from a unix-like setup, thanks to your tons of scripts :)

I have created a dotfiles repository a long time ago, like many other developers do, to centralize all the tools that I reuse across my computer setups. I actually have only 2 computers and I did not change my machine for years, so I do not need it often, but I still keep it up-to-date “just in case”, or for showcase.
That is what this post is about.

I am particularly proud of some really handy scripts, so here it is:

My top 10 snippets to make life better for PHP devs on Windows

Let’s start!

🚀

Snippet: https://github.com/Pierstoval/dotfiles/blob/main/windows_bin/mysqldocker.bat

Start MySQL using docker in 1 second so you can reuse it anytime, while even keeping its data persistent:

This script will start a global Docker container named mysql with port 3316 (to avoid conflicting with other servers).

Now you can connect to it using the root / root username/password couple, and the 127.0.0.1 hostname!

To run a shell on it, run docker exec -i mysql mysql -uroot -proot.

Pro tip: Create an alias for the above snippet and run it whenever you want to launch a mysql shell on your container 😉.

Snippet: https://github.com/Pierstoval/dotfiles/blob/main/windows_bin/traefikd.bat

This one launches an instance of Traefik using Docker.

⚠️ Note that this instance will listen to ports 80, 8080 and 443, so be careful with your other projects or tools that might also listen to these ports!

When running globally like this, Traefik can be used as a proxy to organize your projects and their architecture.

3. Symfony binary, the HTTP server

Snippet: https://github.com/Pierstoval/dotfiles/blob/main/windows_bin/sfserve.bat

The Symfony CLI binary is sometimes really problematic because it will crash from time to time on Windows, and you do not even get a notice (nor a reason why it crashed either). I noted that sometimes it happens during a composer install or composer update, but I do not know what it has to do with. Possibly cache, or something.

Anyway, I sometimes prefer to run it in an infinite loop so that any server crash will restart it afterwards.

That is what this snippet does, basically.

Note: this will be running in front in a terminal window, so I suggest you run it in a separate terminal instance or tab.

4. Symfony binary, the PHP server

Snippet: https://github.com/Pierstoval/dotfiles/blob/main/windows_bin/stopphp.bat

Symfony CLI on Windows will try to use php-cgi.exe when starting a server, and there are some inconsistencies when stopping php-cgi. When doing symfony server:stop, sometimes, it is… not really stopped.

So I execute this stopphp snippet and I am 100% certain that no other server will be running.

5. Merge PDFs on Windows using GhostScript

Snippet: https://github.com/Pierstoval/dotfiles/blob/main/windows_bin/merge-pdfs.bat

If like me you sometimes have to merge PDFs together, install Ghostscript for Windows, make gs.exe available in the PATH.

You can then do merge-pdfs pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf ... and it will create an output.pdf file in the current dir!

6. Get current timestamp with Windows cmd

Snippet: https://github.com/Pierstoval/dotfiles/blob/main/windows_bin/localdate.bat

Seriously, getting “time” values in Windows cmd is cumbersome.

So, I created this localdate script.

It outputs the date formated like this: 2020-06-25 11:49:25.161.

7. Stop all running containers with Docker For Windows

Snippet: https://github.com/Pierstoval/dotfiles/blob/main/windows_bin/dockerstopall.bat

Stop all running docker containers by running this dockerstopall script!

You should be able to backport this script to other platforms, by the way.

8. Git aliases

Snippets:

Here comes the legendary gst alias that just executes git status, or gd that executes git diff.

9. Create daemons on Windows

Windows does not really have this concept of a “daemon”, but instead it has a similar concept: “services”.

To create a service, it is theoretically easy to do with the built-in sc command on Windows.

However, this program is not really intuitive, and sc create is not easy as it looks at first glance.

That is why I am using NSSM, and I added it to my dotfiles so I don’t have to re-download it from its main site each time I setup a new machine.

I already talked about NSSM in a previous post about Apache and PHP-FPM on Windows, check it out.

You now can create daemons by running nssm install {your daemon name}, and you can then customize everything: binary, arguments, working directory, environment variables, i/o, timeouts, rotate log files…
Everything.

10. Unix alias equivalent for Windows.

Since Windows does not have a shell similar to sh or bash, you cannot have a one-single file to store your aliases, and cannot do something like alias something="my other command".

Therefore, what you need is to write .bat or .cmd files with your script alias, and make sure this file is accessible in the PATH environment variable.

I then got tons of other shortcuts like that, such as “dcp” for “docker-compose” or “sf” for “php bin/console”. Check the

I have shared in point n°8 my aliases for Git, but you can actually create tons of other aliases!

What I like the most is that since Windows does not support hashbangs/shebang lines (the #!/bin/bash line you see on top of many unix-compliant executables), you can somehow “bypass” this by creating an alias to any non-Windows executable.

Here is an example for php-cs-fixer:

@echo OFF
:: in case DelayedExpansion is on and a path contains "!"
setlocal DISABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION
php "%~dp0php-cs-fixer.phar" %*

Let me explain all of this, since there is a lot of code for a few behavior:

  • @echo off is here to avoid Windows to output every line of the cmd script when you execute it.
  • :: is a line-comment (well, it is actually not, it in fact is a goto/call label, but as it is always invalid since : is an invalid label, it then works just like a comment). You could also have used REM instead (which stands for “remark”).
  • setlocal DISABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION, is a safety mark to avoid having issues with the ! character. There is a really nice explanation on this StackOverflow issue if you are keen to learn more about this statement.
  • We start the instruction with the php binary, that should be accessible from the PATH.
  • The %~dp0 instruction contains more information than it looks:
    • %0 is equivalent to $0 in a Unix-like script, which contains the file being executed (your .bat/.cmd file).
    • ~ is a modifier that operates on the 0 var being processed, and will trim " characters around the filename.
    • d is a modifier that forces to expand to a drive letter, if it was not present.
    • p makes sure that the variable is expanded to full path, to have the “real path”.

    There also is a nice StackOverflow issue explaining the other modifiers you can use to expand variables to paths in Window batch scripts.

  • Then, we glue the “full directory path” with the php-cs-fixer.phar PHAR file (which you could replace with anything else you wanted to execute, hence the reasons why I have many cmd scripts looking similar).
  • Finally, the %* instruction is similar to $@ in unix scripts: it expands to all the other arguments you passed to the current scripts.
    With something like this: 
    php-cs-fixer.bat fix --config=.php_cs

    It will expand to this:

    php c:\path\to\php-cs-fixer.phar fix --config=.php_cs

    In this case, %* equals fix --config=.php_cs.

Wow, all these explanations on how to create aliases!

In the end, what you mostly have to do is copy/paste any existing alias-file, and thoroughly check it to make sure it works properly.

Create everything you need in the same way to have a much better windows cmd experience!

Hope you liked this post 😄.