readline

Christian's code works well, but if you want to be able to hide the user input and not echo it to screen, you need to add -s to the read command. The code below is an expanded function that allows an optional prompt and optional hiding of the input:

function read_password($prompt=null, $hide=false)
{
    if($prompt) print $prompt;
    $s = ($hide) ? '-s' : '';
    $f=popen("read $s; echo \$REPLY","r");
    $input=fgets($f,100);
    pclose($f);
    if($hide) print "\n";
    return $input;
}

If your CLI script accepts input from STDIN and you also want it to prompt for a password (e.g. as mysql client does), then readline() won't work for you. 
What you need to do is read from the terminal device as shown below.

function readline_terminal($prompt = '') {
    $prompt && print $prompt;
    $terminal_device = '/dev/tty';
    $h = fopen($terminal_device, 'r');
    if ($h === false) {
        #throw new RuntimeException("Failed to open terminal device $terminal_device");
        return false; # probably not running in a terminal.
    }
    $line = rtrim(fgets($h),"\r\n");
    fclose($h);
    return $line;
}
$pass = readline_terminal('Password: ');

In CGI mode be sure to call:

ob_implicit_flush(true);

at the top of your script if you want to be able to output data before and after the prompt.

-- Tomas V.V.Cox

a few observations....

I use Cygwin PHP v7 and readline is available. The readline_list_history() function though is not defined.

A prompt with escape sequences are sanitized, so use something like:

<?php
    echo("\e[0m\e[34mPromt>\e[0m");
    $inp = readline(' ');
?>

I have not fully documented it, but I see that sometimes strings beginning with punctuation characters do not make it into the history with readline_add_history(). They also sometimes clear the prompt string.

Note that readline() will return boolean "false" when the user presses CTRL+D.