Today we celebrate 10 years of n98-magerun2 (together with Magento 2)!

Development was tough. I was part of a team that published the first Magento 2 Enterprise Edition shop in Europe. This gave us unique insights and early access to Magento 2 during its (very unstable) development phase. As a result, we often had to refactor large parts of our own codebase because Magento 2 itself changed significantly several times.

Our initial idea was to add Magento 2 support directly into the existing n98-magerun version for Magento 1. In the early days of Magento 2 development, only the old Zend-style class names had been renamed (e.g., Mage_Catalog_Model_Product became Magento\Catalog\Model\Product). However, as development progressed, we quickly realized that it was impossible to support both Magento versions in one tool. The platform changes were simply too dramatic. So, we decided to build a completely new tool in a separate GitHub repository.

The entire development took about one year.

That was quite an achievement considering Magento 1 and n98-magerun1 were still dominant in the market at the time, and we had to continue maintaining the de facto standard CLI tool for Magento 1. During the development of n98-magerun2, we even released several new versions of n98-magerun1.

Development Milestones

• November 2014: Development of n98-magerun2 started.
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• December 2014: The installer was ready.
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• January 2015: Cache commands and the first developer commands were added, including Dependency Injection support.
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• February 2015: PSR-4 support for the autoloader was implemented. Some system commands were ready.
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• November 2015: Version 1.0.0 of n98-magerun2 was released.
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I tried to keep all the fellows up-to-date about the development progress via Twitter.

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The Magento 2 Release Party

The official 1.0.0 release of n98-magerun2 was presented during the Magento 2 Release Party in Mainz, held at the stadium of the German Bundesliga club Mainz 05. Together with Tom Klingenberg, we proudly announced the stable release.

On that same day, Magento 2 was officially launched during Meet Magento in Australia. That was our internal deadline — our goal was to ensure every developer could start working with n98-magerun2 the moment Magento 2 was released. We made it! It was a tough challenge, but we fixed the last bugs on the very same day.

n98-magerun vs. n98-magerun2

In 2015, we created a download page for the PHAR files of both versions. To reduce confusion, a compatibility check for the correct tool was built directly into n98-magerun2. This check remained in place for several years and was removed about a year ago. The download page still exists and received a major redesign in 2025.

The future of n98-magerun

The future of the tool depends on the time we spend all together to push it. Over the years several hundred people provided active feedback by submitting code, bug reports or created blog posts about the tool. Over the last decade we saw a huge transformation in the Magento Eco-System. With your help we can together build the future.

Thanks to all the hundreds of people who have given their time and expertise. Special thanks to the people that directly provided code for the tool.

Thank you to everyone (also if you submitted issues to the tracker) for your valuable contributions!

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Thanks, Ruud van Zuidam, for bringing the 10 years of n98-magerun2 to my mind with your LinkedIn Post.