PHPStan is a fantastic tool for a static analysis of PHP code. It reads the code and PHPDoc and will try to detect potential issues such as:

undefined variables

incorrect types passed throughout the codebase

use of non-existent methods and attributes

passing of incorrect number of parameters to a method

use of possible null-pointers

lot more...

Apart from being able to analyse regular PHP code, PHPStan can understand even some framework-specific magic using custom-made extensions.

But let's start from the beginning...

PHPStan installation

You can install PHPStan either directly with all its dependencies by running:

composer require --dev phpstan/phpstan

Or you can install phpstan-shim :

composer require --dev phpstan/phpstan-shim

The advantage of phpstan-shim is that it is a Phar file with all the dependencies packed inside (and prefixed), so they won't conflict with other dependencies you may have in your project. Therefore, I prefer using phpstan-shim .

To have the extensions configured automatically, you need to install phpstan/extension-installer :

composer require --dev phpstan/extension-installer

Using PHPStan

PHPStan can be run this way:

vendor/bin/phpstan analyse -l 0 src tests

It will probably report bunch of errors depending on your project size and age. The best approach from here is to gradually fix the issues and raise the level of strictness ( -l 1 etc.).

If there are some issues which cannot be fixed easily, you can exclude them from the report. When doing so, try to be specific and put the filename in the exclude, so you won't exclude the issues from the whole project. And don't forget to properly escape the regular expressions, or you may be excluding way more things than you wanted (hint: | needs to be escaped too). Those exclusions should be included in phpstan.neon configuration file (which is passed as -c phpstan.neon to the analyse command).

You should also have a look at a new Baseline Feature in PHPStan, which allows you ignore all the current issues and let the PHPStan check just the new code.

Adding PHPStan to CI build

To prevent issues from creeping back to the codebase, you should include PHPStan in you CI build to have it fail when a new error appears.

It can be done easily by using Composer Scripts. Your scripts section in composer.json can look like this:

"scripts": { "phpstan": "phpstan analyse -c phpstan.neon src tests --level 7 --no-progress", "tests": "phpunit", "ci": [ "@phpstan", "@tests" ], }

It will run both the phpstan and tests scripts when you run composer ci .

Note: If you have a Symfony application, you will already have a scripts section in your composer.json , so just add new items there.

You can read more thoroughly about Composer Scripts in my article Have you tried Composer Scripts? You may not need Phing.

Configuring the Symfony extension

You might have noticed that PHPStan reports some issues in Symfony-specific code, that works OK. It is because there is no way for PHPStan to understand Symfony magic just from the code itself. It includes getting services from Container (you should not be doing it anyway!), working with arguments and options in Commands and much more.

To have those errors disappear, you need to install phpstan/phpstan-symfony extension and provide PHPStan with a path to Symfony container compiled to XML. It is usually stored in the var/cache/dev directory. The following configuration should be added to phpstan.neon file:

parameters: symfony: container_xml_path: var/cache/dev/srcApp_KernelDevDebugContainer.xml

Also, to have the Commands analysed properly, PHPStan needs a console loader. It is a script that initializes the Symfony Console for the application and passes it to PHPStan. It can use it to determine the arguments or options types etc.

I usually put it in build/phpstan/console-loader.php :

<?php declare(strict_types = 1); use App\Kernel; use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Console\Application; require dirname(__DIR__) . '/../config/bootstrap.php'; $kernel = new Kernel($_SERVER['APP_ENV'], (bool) $_SERVER['APP_DEBUG']); return new Application($kernel);

The configuration file phpstan.neon should look like this:

parameters: symfony: container_xml_path: var/cache/dev/srcApp_KernelDevDebugContainer.xml console_application_loader: build/phpstan/console-loader.php

With this configuration, PHPStan can understand the Symfony code. It also checks that you are not fetching non-existent (or private) services from container.

Configuring PHPStan with PHPUnit

In the previous part we have successfully configured PHPStan to check various things in Symfony projects. However, it is still possible to improve the configuration.

We are now using same configuration file for both src and tests , but Symfony uses a separate container when running in either dev or test environments. It means that PHPStan will report errors such as Service "Doctrine\ORM\EntityManagerInterface" is private. even if the tests work fine.

The solution is simple - use a separate configuration file for src and for tests . We can keep the current phpstan.neon , but we have to create specific configuration for tests - phpstan-tests.neon . It will look very similarly with only change being the container_xml_path which now points to the container compiled in var/cache/test :

parameters: symfony: container_xml_path: var/cache/test/srcApp_KernelTestDebugContainer.xml console_application_loader: build/phpstan/console-loader.php

You need to adjust the scripts setup in composer.json to run PHPStan twice - first for the src directory and then for the tests with a different configuration file. When using this setup, you can still run composer phpstan which in turn runs checks for both src and tests .

"phpstan": [ "@phpstan-general", "@phpstan-tests" ], "phpstan-general": "phpstan analyse -c phpstan.neon src --level 7 --no-progress", "phpstan-tests": "phpstan analyse -c phpstan-tests.neon tests --level 7 --no-progress",

I know that the PHPStan configuration is duplicated a little bit, but that does not matter much (you are not adding new extensions that often).

One thing that you must keep in mind is that the Symfony container must be compiled before it can be used for analysis. You can do it by running bin/console cache:warmup --env=dev and bin/console cache:warmup --env=test . As it needs to be part of the CI build, you can put it to the Composer scripts as well:

"phpstan": [ "@php bin/console cache:warmup --env=dev", "@php bin/console cache:warmup --env=test", "@phpstan-general", "@phpstan-tests" ],

Or you can put it into a separate script, so it won't be slowing you down when running PHPStan repeatedly without changes in the container (but you must make sure that the container is recompiled for the test environment after change).

Finally, we are getting to configuring the PHPUnit extension itself. We need to install it through Composer:

composer require --dev phpstan/phpstan-phpunit

It will be included automatically thanks to the phpstan/extension-installer we installed in the beginning. So that's it.

PHPStan and Doctrine ORM

Doctrine ORM contains even more magic things which can't be inferred just from the code itself. Repository and Entity Manager use object type in lot of places, so the PHPStan won't know which type is there and you would need to add lots of inline PHPDoc to make it work.

Or you can install phpstan/phpstan-doctrine extension which helps PHPStan to understand Doctrine magic.

composer require --dev phpstan/phpstan-doctrine

Like with Symfony extension, you must help Doctrine extension by creating a loader script that provides an Entity Manager so PHPStan can query it about various things. I usually put it into build/phpstan/doctrine-orm-bootstrap.php and the script should look like this:

<?php declare(strict_types = 1); use App\Kernel; require dirname(__DIR__) . '/../config/bootstrap.php'; $kernel = new Kernel($_SERVER['APP_ENV'], (bool) $_SERVER['APP_DEBUG']); $kernel->boot(); return $kernel->getContainer()->get('doctrine')->getManager();

You should add this to respective sections in both phpstan.neon and phpstan-tests.neon :

parameters: doctrine: objectManagerLoader: build/phpstan/doctrine-orm-bootstrap.php

With this setup PHPStan will use the EntityManager to also check your DQLs and Query Builders, which is awesome.

Next version of PHPStan-Doctrine extension will also support analysis of the entity annotations to determine whether the property type matches the column type, whether the property types for associations are defined correctly etc.

Bleeding edge features

PHPStan can check even more things when you enable bleeding edge rules from the core of PHPStan. Current PHPStan release is 0.11.x is mostly backwards compatible (not that many new issues are detected between patch versions). However, Ondra practices something along the lines of the trunk-based development, where new features (checks!) are hidden behind feature flags.

You can enable all of them by adding this to your configuration files (applies to phpstan-shim , the path will be different for a regular installation):

includes: - phar://phpstan.phar/conf/bleedingEdge.neon

Strict rules

There is a phpstan/phpstan-strict-rules package which adds opinionated checks not included in the PHPStan core. You can install it through Composer:

composer require --dev phpstan/phpstan-strict-rules

And suddenly you will get many more potential issues or bad practices reported :-)

Conclusion

If you configure the PHPStan according to this article, it will change your life :-) (at least a little bit).

Nowadays I can't imagine developing modern PHP applications without PHPStan running on max level with lots of checks. It helps to prevent many issues during development and refactoring of the applications.