@shovemedia @futurebird Check out Phabricator and Arcanist. Phab is like a GitHub in PHP; arc is its command line client. Both are dead projects now afaik, but they show how you can do some pretty amazing stuff in PHP.
In a month or two I will finish eliminating our last uses of arcanist and will remove php from our internal Ubuntu distro, and the whole company will clap.
But if you do want to use php, Arcanist is a great example.
Apparently there's a successor, Phorge, but I don't know anything about it.