php-coding-standard (phpcstd)

phpcstd combines various code quality tools (e.g. linting and static analysis) into one, easy to use package which can be shared across teams and code bases.

There are two parts to this:

1. phpcstd executes all the enabled tools and returns a single per-file error output
2. In your projects, you depend on a single repository (e.g. acme/coding-standard) which depends on phpcstd and includes the various base configurations (e.g. phpmd.xml, ecs.yaml, ...). Your own projects then depend on your own coding standard.

phpcstd itself does not come with any tools preinstalled. You can take a look at my own coding standards as an example.

Tools supported

Tool	Lint	Fix	Source list	Description
⭐ EasyCodingStandard	✅	✅	✅	Combination of PHP_CodeSniffer and PHP-CS-Fixer
PHP Mess Detector	✅	❌	✅	Code complexity checker
PHP_CodeSniffer	✅	✅	✅	Style linter + fixer
⭐ composer-normalize	✅	✅	✅	Validates and rearranges composer.json files
phan	✅	✅	❌	Static analyzer, requires the "php-ast" extension
⭐ php-parallel-lint	✅	❌	✅	Checks for PHP (syntax) errors (using php -l)
⭐ phpstan	✅	❌	⏹	Static analyzer, source list is optional, but not recommended
psalm	✅	✅	✅	Static analyzer
⭐ rector	✅	✅	✅	Code up-/downgrading and refactoring tool
deptrac	✅	❌	❌	Static analyzer that enforces rules for dependencies between software layers

⭐ = recommended

Getting started

composer require-dev spaceemotion/php-coding-standard

This will install the phpcstd binary to your vendor folder.

Configuration via .phpcstd(.dist).ini

To minimize dependencies, phpcstd uses .ini-files for its configuration. If no .phpcstd.ini file can be found in your project folder, a .phpcstd.dist.ini file will be used as fallback (if possible).

Command options

Usage:
  run [options] [--] [<files>...]

Arguments:
  files                 List of files to parse instead of the configured sources

Options:
  -s, --skip=SKIP       Disables the list of tools during the run (comma-separated list) (multiple values allowed)
  -o, --only=ONLY       Only executes the list of tools during the run (comma-separated list) (multiple values allowed)
      --continue        Run the next check even if the previous one failed
      --fix             Try to fix any linting errors
      --hide-source     Hides the "source" lines from console output
      --lint-staged     Uses "git diff" to determine staged files to lint
      --ci              Changes the output format to GithubActions for better CI integration
      --no-fail         Only returns with exit code 0, regardless of any errors/warnings
  -h, --help            Display help for the given command. When no command is given display help for the run command
  -q, --quiet           Do not output any message
  -V, --version         Display this application version
      --ansi            Force ANSI output
      --no-ansi         Disable ANSI output
  -n, --no-interaction  Do not ask any interactive question
  -v|vv|vvv, --verbose  Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal output, 2 for more verbose output and 3 for debug

Instead of defining the files/folders directly (in either the config or as arguments), you can also pipe a list into it:

$ ls -A1 | vendor/bin/phpcstd

Git Hooks

To not have to wait for CI pipelines to finish, you can use git hooks to run over the changed files before committing.

vendor/bin/phpcstd --lint-staged

CI-Support

Github Actions

The --ci flag returns a format that can be used by GithubActions to annotate commits and PRs (see their documentation on how this works).

Development

Using Docker

1. Spin up the container using GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN=<token> docker-compose up -d --build
2. Run all commands using docker-compose exec php <command here>

Using XDebug

This project uses composer/xdebug-handler to improve performance by disabling xdebug upon startup. To enable XDebug during development you need to set the following env variable: PHPCSTD_ALLOW_XDEBUG=1 (as written in their README).