phpsh is an interactive shell for php that features readline history, tab completion, quick access to documentation. It was developed at Facebook and ironically, is written mostly in python. Here you can check a screenshot below to find out what exactly are we jabber-jabbering!!

You can grab the .tar.gz from www.phpsh.org/phpsh-latest.tgz

This application requires PHP (4/5) and python 2.4+ to be installed on yoursystem. Once you download and extract the contents of the package, there will be a file called phpsh in the extracted directory (which will also be phpsh on default extraction). Change the permissions of this file to exectuable and then execute it as you would do with any other executable file. Voila, a new PHP terminal awaits you now! Go ahead n explore.

TIP: 1) press q and hit enter to quit
2) start the phpsh script with -c switch to remove the colouring

For more details about deploying phpsh on debian head over to the article at this link.