PHP Tooling

Packages which are supported by JetBrains PhpStorm are denoted by (PS).

Package Management

• Composer – 20.7k Stars – (PS) – The main tool used to manage dependencies in PHP.
  • composer -v – Check that composer is working, see currently installed version.
  • composer list – See a list of the available commands for composer.
  • composer help command – Shows documentation related to the desired command.
  • composer init – Initializes composer for the given project.
  • composer require name/package – Adds to the composer.json and can install the specified package.
    • Use --dev before the name/package to indicate this dependency is only needed for development, not production.
  • composer show – List of currently required packages.
  • composer install – Uses an existing composer.json to install dependencies.
  • composer update – Updates dependencies to latest available.
• Packagist – An online repository of packages for PHP, used in conjunction with Composer.
• Phive – Not so much for installing dependencies as for installing tooling. Love this.

Editors/IDEs

• PHPStorm
• Visual Studio Code
• Eclipse PDT

Static Code Analysis

• Psalm (by Vimeo) – 2.3k Stars
• Phan – 4.8k Stars – Static analyzer.
• PHP Static Analysis Tool (phpstan) – 8k Stars
• PHP CodeSniffer (phpcs) – 7.3k stars – (PS)
  • Tom McFarlin. Installing Multiple Coding Standards. 5/2019.
• PHP Coding Standards Fixer – 8k Stars – (PS, VSC) – Automatically correct PHP Coding Standards issues.
• PHP Mess Detector – (PS)
• Php Inspections (EA Extended) – (PS) – A PhpStorm plugin that provides numerous additional inspections beyond those bundled with PhpStorm.

Testing

• PHPUnit – 14.6k Stars – (PS) – The defacto standard for unit testing PHP.
  • setUp Method
  • tearDown Method
  • test*() Methods
  • @depends Annotation
  • Assertions
• Faker – 21.6k Stars
• Prophecy – 6.8k Stars – Mocking framework.
• PHP Code Coverage – 6.5k
• Mockery – 8.3k Stars – For creating mock objects.
• PHPSpec – (PS)
• Behat – (PS)
• Codeception – (PS) – A popular testing framework.

Debugging

• Xdebug – (PS) – 1.7k Stars
• Zend Debugger – (PS)
• PHP Debug Bar – 3.2k Stars

Other Tooling

• PHP Documentor – 2.4k Stars
• phpdotenv – 9.6k Stars – Allows environment variables to be loaded from .env to getenv().
• Deployer – 7k Stars – Deployment Tool.
• Behat – 3.1k Stars – BDD.
• psr/log
• monolog/monolog
• webmozart/assert
• Phing – (PS)

Database

• phpMyAdmin – 4.4k Stars
• Adminer – 3.6k Stars – DB management.