Your First PXP File

This page will introduce you to the PXP command line tool and teach you how to write your first PXP file.

Creating a file

Start by creating a new file called hello.pxp.

$ touch hello.pxp

Open the file in your chosen text editor and insert the following code:

php

<?php

echo "Hello, world!\n";

There's no PXP specific syntax here just yet. This is just focused on actually processing the PXP file and producing PHP code.

To build the hello.pxp file, use the pxp build command.

$ pxp build ./hello.pxp --stdout

The --stdout flag will print the generated PHP code in your terminal instead of writing it to disk.

You should see the following output:

php

<?php

echo "Hello, world!\n";

To check that the PHP code works, pipe the output into php.

$ pxp build ./hello.pxp --stdout | php

You should see Hello, world! in your terminal.

Instead of outputting the generated code in the terminal, you'll likely want to write the generated code to a file.

This is as simple as removing the --stdout flag and running the same command again.

$ pxp build ./hello.pxp

This will create a new hello.php file next to your hello.pxp file with the generated PHP code.

You can configure the output destination for generated files inside of your project configuration.