Organizing PHP Quality Tools

In the last two chapters, you learned a lot about quality metrics and how to measure them. There will surely be a couple of tools you would like to use in your future work environment, and these tools work best if they are seamlessly integrated so that you don’t even have to think about using them anymore.

Therefore, in this chapter, we will show you how you can organize these tools in a way that they will be the most productive and helpful in your daily work. This includes the following topics:

• Installing code quality tools using Composer
• Installing code quality tools as phar files
• Managing phar files using the PHAR Installation and Verification Environment (Phive)

Technical requirements

If you followed the examples in the previous two chapters, you do not need to install anything else. If not, please go back to those chapters and install all the necessary tools first.

All code samples can be found in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Clean-Code-in-PHP.

Installing code quality tools using Composer

Most PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) projects nowadays use Composer for a good reason. Before it entered the PHP world in 2012, keeping all external dependencies (that is, code from other developers) up to date required a lot of manual work. The required files had to be downloaded from the corresponding websites and added to the correct folders of the project. Autoloading (that is, the automatic resolving of file paths from the class name) was not standardized, if available at all. So, usually, the wanted classes needed to be actively imported using require() or require_once(). If there were any conflicts between package versions, you had to somehow solve the issues yourself.

Composer greatly simplified these efforts by solving these issues. It introduced a central repository called Packagist (https://packagist.org), where all available packages are hosted. Furthermore, it fixed the version problem by introducing version constraints...

Installing code quality tools as phar files

Composer is not the only possible way to add code quality tools to your project. In this section, we will show you to add the tools as phar files.

We already came across phar in the previous chapters. It stands for PHP Archive and can be considered a whole PHP project within a single file. Technically, it is a self-executable ZIP archive that contains the source code of the application plus all necessary dependencies as well. The big advantage is that the required code is available immediately after download, so you can instantly use any phar file right away without having to care about Composer or dependencies at all. Furthermore, phar files are supported by all modern PHP versions.

This makes the usage of phar files quite handy, as you can treat them like binaries. Usually, you can download the many PHP tools we introduced to you so far as phar files directly and place them in whatever directory you want. However, there is no unified...

Managing phar files using Phive

In the previous section, we learned about using phar files instead of using Composer to install our code quality tools. This approach works fine, but it does require some extra work in case you want to update them.

Phive is a tool that takes over that extra work. Let us install it right away.

Naturally, Phive itself can be downloaded as phar, too. The following commands will download it under the name phive and make it executable:

$ wget https://github.com/phar-io/phive/releases/download/0.15.1/phive-0.15.1.phar -O phive
$ chmod +x phive

Please note that this installation method is not very secure. Check the tool’s website (https://phar.io) to learn how to install it securely and how to make it globally available.

For demonstration purposes, the simple download works just fine. Once the file is downloaded and made executable, you can directly start using Phive to install the first tools. Let us use phploc, which we introduced in...

Summary

Composer is an indispensable part of today’s PHP world. The usual approach to adding code quality tools to your project is by adding them to the require-dev section of the dependencies, which works fine in many cases.

However, Composer is not the one and only way there is. Therefore, in this chapter, we introduced two more options to manage your code quality tools: by adding the phar files manually to your project, or by utilizing Phive to manage the phar files.

You are probably eager to apply all your gained knowledge to your code now. However, relentless refactoring can do more harm than good, and clicking through all parts of your application after every change to check if anything broke will cost you a lot of time and can be very frustrating. Thus, in the next chapter, we will show you how automated testing can help you here.