Hello,
To interact with a MediaWiki installation, one typically uses maintenance/eval.php which let you executes command and get results interactively.
It has several drawbacks though such as lack of code completion, colors or dieing on PHP fatal errors.
There is a nice console for PHP: http://psysh.org/
I eventually wrote a little patches to integrate it in a new script maintenance/console.php:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/334217/
It is a very basic evening hack, but I would appreciate some early feedback about it. Hopefully we can get it polished and eventually end up with a better command than eval.php :]
Thx!