PhpStorm 2016.3 Early Access Program Started

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Great news: we are starting the Early Access Program for PhpStorm 2016.3! The fresh build 163.3512 is available for download and we are eagerly awaiting your feedback in the issue tracker.



This build includes new features, bug fixes and improvements for PHP and the Web, and takes on the latest improvements in IntelliJ Platform.

Ability to open several PhpStorm projects in one frame

In PhpStorm 2016.3 EAP you have a possibility to attach/detach a project to the current one. This will allow you to do a cross-project refactoring. Please note that all the settings will be taken from the primary project, so no per-project PHP settings are allowed.

Support of Docker in Remote Interpreters

Now you can add Docker as a remote PHP interpreter in the “Configure Remote PHP Interpreter” settings in PhpStorm. Thus it becomes even easier to setup your development environment with Docker and start the PHP Scripts, PHPUnit tests, Behat tests, PHP CodeSniffer or PHP Mess Detector inside Docker.

Сompletion of overridden methods and fields without function and var keyword

In PhpStorm 2016.3 it’s allowed to complete overridden methods and fields without function and var keywords. When you invoke completion you will see a method and a field available to override.

Project wide PHP 7 strict types

We’ve added a “Missing Strict Types Declaration” inspection which enables strict type mode in PhpStorm (Settings|Editor|Code Style|Inspections|PHP|Type Compatibility). It gives a warning if you didn’t have declare(strict_types=1); as the first line of the file. There is also an intention which allows you to fix this across the whole project. This is especially useful if you are converting a whole project to PHP 7 and want to enable strict types.

Improved support of PSR-0/PSR-4

“Create new test” and “Create new class” actions were improved and now they take into account PSR-0/PSR-4 and allow you to generate new folders. Also if you have a folder marked as “Test Source Root” this folder will be picked up automatically in the directory field when you create a new test.

Auto-detection and configuration of PHPUnit and Behat

We made it easier to set up PHPUnit and Behat for your project. Now existence of these test frameworks will be detected from the composer.json and you will get a popup tooltip suggesting configure them automatically.

PHP stubs are shown as external libraries

Now PHP stubs are shown as an external library in PhpStorm.

PHP UML support directories

In PhpStorm 2016.3 we’ve added support of directories for UML diagrams. You can expand classes/subfolder by clicking Expand in directory context menu.

Support of list() and array of objects

PhpStorm 2016.3 correctly sets up types of variables inside list() if on the right side of assignment is a array of objects.

New option to surround chars ‘->’ with spaces

We’ve added an option which allow automatically surround ‘->‘ with spaces. You can activate it in Settings|Editor|Code Style|PHP and check Object access operator (->) in the Spaces tab.

Improvements from platform side

This update brings many Version Control improvements, such as Undo commit, Restore and Delete tracked branch actions, Sign-off commit, and Scope highlighting and other changes. You can find more details in the IntelliJ blog.

JavaScript and CSS

PhpStorm 2016.3 also brings major improvements in its support of top-notch web technologies, such as integration with Flow, PostCSS support, smarter rename for TypeScript, more Angular CLI, grouping generated files in ProjectView, and generation of .editorconfig. You can find more details in the WebStorm blog.

Other Changes

Other changes worth mentioning:

Improvements in anonymous classes support

Support of PHPUnit application-level configurations

See the complete list in our issue tracker and read the full release notes for PhpStorm 2016.3 EAP 163.3512.

Download PhpStorm 2016.3 EAP build 163.3512 for your platform from project EAP page, and please report any bugs and feature requests to our issue tracker.

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