cakephp - How to load a component in console/shell

Question

In CakePHP, how do I load a component in a shell?

To use a component in a controller, you include an array of components in a property called $components. That doesn't work for my Shell. Neither does the "on-the-fly" loading suggested in the documentation.

class MakePdfsShell extends Shell {
    public $components = array('Document'); // <- this doesn't work
    public function main()
    {
        $this->Document = $this->Components->load('Document'); // <- this doesnt work either
        $this->Document->generate(); // <- this is what I want to do
    }
    ...

Answer 1

I have some xml utilities that I use across some of my controllers. One of the controller launches a heavy task via the cake console, so that it can quietly run in the background via PHP CLI, while the user's request is immediately completed (once the task done, it will e-mail the results to the user).

The xml utilities are generic enough to be used in controller and shell, are too specific to the application to warrant them vendor status. The offered solution with the Lib folder does not work as in CakePhp v3 there seems to be no Lib folder.

After some quite some time spent, I managed to load my controller component to the shell task. Here is how to:

namespace AppShell;

use CakeConsoleShell;

use CakeCoreApp;
use CakeControllerComponent;
use CakeControllerComponentRegistry;
use AppControllerComponentXmlUtilitiesComponent;   // <- resides in your app's src/Controller/Component folder

class XmlCheckShell extends Shell
{

    public function initialize() {
        $this->Utilities = new XmlUtilitiesComponent(new ComponentRegistry());
    }

...

$this->Utilities can now be used across my entire shell class.