Kohana `index.php` method chaining and minions?

Question

In the Kohana index.php file, there's a clause I have two questions about:

if (PHP_SAPI == 'cli') // Try and load minion
{
class_exists('Minion_Task') OR die('Please enable the Minion module for CLI support.');
set_exception_handler(array('Minion_Exception', 'handler'));

Minion_Task::factory(Minion_CLI::options())->execute();
}
else
{
/**
 * Execute the main request. A source of the URI can be passed, eg:  $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'].
 * If no source is specified, the URI will be automatically detected.
 */
echo Request::factory(TRUE, array(), FALSE)
    ->execute()
    ->send_headers(TRUE)
    ->body();
}

1) what is a minion? 2) what does the following mean?

->foo()
->bar()
->...etx

is that just method chaining?

Answer 1

1) In the first part of that code, Kohana is checking to see if your script is running from command line (CLI). If so, it tries to execute a task using Minion.

Minion is a framework for running tasks via the CLI.

See: https://github.com/kohana/minion

And: http://kohanaframework.org/3.3/guide/minion/

2) And yes that is method chaining that you are seeing in the second part of the code. It could just as easily be rewritten as:

$request = Request::factory(TRUE, array(), FALSE);
$response = $request->execute();
$response->send_headers(TRUE);
echo $response->body();