DragonBe's PHP blog

It goes without saying people should document their code so that after a few weeks, months, years they still know what they did initially and why. Besides providing a mental note in the code, it also helps your IDE to figure out what your class is all about, which parameters should be used with the methods and what their return types are.

But theory is not always reality and unfortunately I've come across too many lines of code that were just lines of code, no comments or annotations provided. So, in best cases I could guess the types and parameters, but in many it was too obfuscated. I already talked about usage of a code sniffer like PHP_CodeSniffer in my previous post where you can validate the usage of comments in the code. But forcing developers (using a pre-commit checker) into writing documentation with their code is not really a good thing. Once people are forced in a corner, they tend to figure out ways to escape and your whole idea to deliver better code goes out the win…

PHP_CodeSniffer is probably the most convenient tool out there to analyze your source code and to verify it complies to company policies. Although it's debatable why source code should follow strict guidelines, it's only a matter of time before you discover yourself that it pays off to have a code base that appears to be written by one developer.
The first question you have to ask is what standard are you going to implement. There are several standards already packaged with PHP_CodeSniffer, but are they useful within your company? Maybe you want to extend or override some standards with your own implementation. Do remember, the standards supplied with PHP_CodeSniffer have been negotiated over and over by the developers for ages. So if you want to define your own standards, be warned that it can be a long and tedious track before you can agree on a specific standard.
Installation Installing PHP_CodeSniffer is easy when using the PEAR framework. Make sure you have installed and u…

PHP Lint PHP Lint is probably the easiest way to validate your code on syntax errors, but it's also the most overlooked feature of PHP on command line.
Provides a convenient way to perform only a syntax check on the given PHP code. On success, the text No syntax errors detected in is written to standard output and the shell return code is 0. On failure, the text Errors parsing in addition to the internal parser error message is written to standard output and the shell return code is set to -1.

This option won't find fatal errors (like undefined functions). Use the -f to test for fatal errors too. Quote taken from http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.options.php.
Example of detecting failures only user@machine: $ /usr/bin/php -l /path/to/myfile.php
Example of detecting failures and fatal errors user@machine: $ /usr/bin/php -lf /path/to/myfile.php
Since this tool also returns numeric return codes, you can use it immediately as a pre-commit hook of your favorite revisi…