Home Web Development Magento 2 Development Cookbook

Magento 2 Development Cookbook

books-svg-icon Book
eBook $43.99 $29.99
Print $54.99
Subscription $15.99 $10 p/m for three months
$10 p/m for first 3 months. $15.99 p/m after that. Cancel Anytime!
What do you get with a Packt Subscription?
This book & 7000+ ebooks & video courses on 1000+ technologies
60+ curated reading lists for various learning paths
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Early Access to eBooks as they are being written
Personalised content suggestions
Customised display settings for better reading experience
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Playlists, Notes and Bookmarks to easily manage your learning
Mobile App with offline access
What do you get with a Packt Subscription?
This book & 6500+ ebooks & video courses on 1000+ technologies
60+ curated reading lists for various learning paths
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Early Access to eBooks as they are being written
Personalised content suggestions
Customised display settings for better reading experience
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Playlists, Notes and Bookmarks to easily manage your learning
Mobile App with offline access
What do you get with eBook + Subscription?
Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats, plus a monthly download credit
This book & 6500+ ebooks & video courses on 1000+ technologies
60+ curated reading lists for various learning paths
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Early Access to eBooks as they are being written
Personalised content suggestions
Customised display settings for better reading experience
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Playlists, Notes and Bookmarks to easily manage your learning
Mobile App with offline access
What do you get with a Packt Subscription?
This book & 6500+ ebooks & video courses on 1000+ technologies
60+ curated reading lists for various learning paths
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Early Access to eBooks as they are being written
Personalised content suggestions
Customised display settings for better reading experience
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Playlists, Notes and Bookmarks to easily manage your learning
Mobile App with offline access
What do you get with eBook?
Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats
Access this title in our online reader
DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want
Online reader with customised display settings for better reading experience
What do you get with video?
Download this video in MP4 format
Access this title in our online reader
DRM FREE - Watch whenever, wherever and however you want
Online reader with customised display settings for better learning experience
What do you get with video?
Stream this video
Access this title in our online reader
DRM FREE - Watch whenever, wherever and however you want
Online reader with customised display settings for better learning experience
What do you get with Audiobook?
Download a zip folder consisting of audio files (in MP3 Format) along with supplementary PDF
What do you get with Exam Trainer?
Flashcards, Mock exams, Exam Tips, Practice Questions
Access these resources with our interactive certification platform
Mobile compatible-Practice whenever, wherever, however you want
BUY NOW $10 p/m for first 3 months. $15.99 p/m after that. Cancel Anytime!
eBook $43.99 $29.99
Print $54.99
Subscription $15.99 $10 p/m for three months
What do you get with a Packt Subscription?
This book & 7000+ ebooks & video courses on 1000+ technologies
60+ curated reading lists for various learning paths
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Early Access to eBooks as they are being written
Personalised content suggestions
Customised display settings for better reading experience
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Playlists, Notes and Bookmarks to easily manage your learning
Mobile App with offline access
What do you get with a Packt Subscription?
This book & 6500+ ebooks & video courses on 1000+ technologies
60+ curated reading lists for various learning paths
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Early Access to eBooks as they are being written
Personalised content suggestions
Customised display settings for better reading experience
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Playlists, Notes and Bookmarks to easily manage your learning
Mobile App with offline access
What do you get with eBook + Subscription?
Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats, plus a monthly download credit
This book & 6500+ ebooks & video courses on 1000+ technologies
60+ curated reading lists for various learning paths
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Early Access to eBooks as they are being written
Personalised content suggestions
Customised display settings for better reading experience
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Playlists, Notes and Bookmarks to easily manage your learning
Mobile App with offline access
What do you get with a Packt Subscription?
This book & 6500+ ebooks & video courses on 1000+ technologies
60+ curated reading lists for various learning paths
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Early Access to eBooks as they are being written
Personalised content suggestions
Customised display settings for better reading experience
50+ new titles added every month on new and emerging tech
Playlists, Notes and Bookmarks to easily manage your learning
Mobile App with offline access
What do you get with eBook?
Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats
Access this title in our online reader
DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want
Online reader with customised display settings for better reading experience
What do you get with video?
Download this video in MP4 format
Access this title in our online reader
DRM FREE - Watch whenever, wherever and however you want
Online reader with customised display settings for better learning experience
What do you get with video?
Stream this video
Access this title in our online reader
DRM FREE - Watch whenever, wherever and however you want
Online reader with customised display settings for better learning experience
What do you get with Audiobook?
Download a zip folder consisting of audio files (in MP3 Format) along with supplementary PDF
What do you get with Exam Trainer?
Flashcards, Mock exams, Exam Tips, Practice Questions
Access these resources with our interactive certification platform
Mobile compatible-Practice whenever, wherever, however you want
  1. Free Chapter
    Upgrading from Magento 1
About this book
With the challenges of growing an online business, Magento 2 is an open source e-commerce platform with innumerable functionalities that gives you the freedom to make on-the-fly decisions. It allows you to customize multiple levels of security permissions and enhance the look and feel of your website, and thus gives you a personalized experience in promoting your business.
Publication date:
December 2015
Publisher
Packt
Pages
304
ISBN
9781785882197

 

Chapter 1. Upgrading from Magento 1

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • Creating a Magento 1 website with sample data

  • Creating a Magento 2 website

  • Preparing an upgrade from Magento 1

  • Upgrading the database

  • Using an IDE

  • Writing clean code with PHP MD and PHP CS

 

Introduction


Magento is one of the most complete e-commerce platforms on the open source market. With a default Magento installation, all the common e-commerce features, such as catalog navigation, promotion rules, tax settings, online payments, and so on are available.

The first version of Magento was released in 2008 after one year of development. Magento was initially designed as an e-commerce system that could be used for a wide range of uses. In later years, Magento became very popular as an out-of-the-box e-commerce system and a lot of minor versions of the 1.x series have been released in the last few years.

To be future proof, Magento started the development of a major upgrade of the system, also known as Magento 2. Magento 2 is a big improvement on every part of Magento. Every aspect is analyzed and rewritten with up-to-date technologies to be ready for the future. Everything, including the developer experience, maintainability, performance, and technologies will be improved.

In this chapter, we will upgrade the data of a Magento 1 installation to a Magento 2 installation. We will also prepare some tools that we can use in the following chapters of this book.

 

Creating a Magento 1 website with sample data


To start a Magento 2 upgrade, we need a Magento 1 webshop with some data. In this recipe, we will install the latest Magento version, 1.9, with the sample data for the new responsive theme.

Getting ready

To install a Magento 1 website, we need the following stuff:

  • A web server (Linux, Apache2, PHP, or MySQL)

  • The Magento 1.9 codebase

  • The Magento 1.9 sample data

Note

The Magento 1.9 codebase and sample data can be downloaded from the Magento site at http://www.magentocommerce.com/download.

The following stuff is recommended for the installation:

  • Command-line access

  • A virtual host (domain name) that is going to be your web root

Note

We recommend that you use a test server that is on your development machine. If you use a Linux or a Mac operating system, you can install the webserver on your local machine. If you have a Windows machine, you can use a virtual Linux server for your development.

How to do it...

  1. Extract the Magento code archive in your webroot (the directory of the virtualhost). An ls -la command should give you the following output:

    api.php
    app
    cron.php
    cron.sh
    downloader
    errors
    favicon.ico
    get.php
    includes
    index.php
    index.php.sample
    install.php
    js
    lib
    LICENSE_AFL.txt
    LICENSE.html
    LICENSE.txt
    mage
    media
    php.ini.sample
    pkginfo
    RELEASE_NOTES.txt
    shell
    skin
    var
    
  2. Extract the sample data archive to a different folder from the webroot. Copy the contents of the media and skin folders to the media and skin folders in your webroot. We can do this by using the following cp command:

    cp –R <path_to_sampledata_folder>/media/* <path_to_magento_folder>/media/
    cp –R <path_to_sampledata_folder/skin/* <path_to_magento_folder>/skin/
    
  3. Create a database for the Magento 1 installation and name it magento1. We can do this by running the following commands:

    mysql -u <username> -p
    create database magento1;
    exit;
    
  4. Import the sql file that is in the sample data directory. This file contains a database that we will import into the magento1 database. We can do this by running the following command:

    mysql -u <username> -p magento1< "path_to_sample_data.sql"
    

    Tip

    To avoid permission problems, ensure that all files and folders have the right permissions. For security reasons, it is recommended that all files have just enough permissions so that only the right users can access the right files. When you give all the rights (777), you don't have permission problems because each user can read, write and, execute each file of your application. More information about file permissions can be found at http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/m1x/install/installer-privileges_after.html.

  5. When the files are in the right place and the database is imported, we can run the Magento installer. Open your browser and go to the domain that is configured for your website. You should see the installer as in the following screenshot:

  6. Continue with the installation process by accepting the terms and conditions.

  7. On the next screen, choose the correct language, locale, and currency for your store.

  8. On the configuration page, fill in the form with the right data:

    • Database Type: MySQL.

    • Host: Enter the hostname or IP address of your database server (localhost if it is on the same machine).

    • Database name: Enter magento1 in this field (or another name if you have a different name for your database).

    • User name: Enter your database username.

    • User password: Enter your database password.

    • Tables prefix: Leave this field empty (the string in this field will be used to prefix all tables of your database).

    • Base URL: Enter the URL of your website in this field.

    • Admin path: Enter admin in this field. This will be the path of the backend.

    • Enable charts: For development, it is recommended that this be unchecked.

    • Skip Base URL Validation Before the Next Step: When checked, the wizard will check for a valid URL when processing this form.

    • Use Web Server (Apache) rewrites: Check this when the apache module mod_rewrite is enabled.

    • Use Secure URL's (SSL): This checkbox must be unchecked if you don't use HTTPS.

  9. Submit this form and we will be forwarded to the next step. In this step, you can configure the administrator account. Fill in the right data and remember the username and password because this is required to manage the store. Leave the encryption key field empty.

  10. After submitting this form, the installation is complete. Optionally, you can submit the Magento survey. At the bottom of the page, there are buttons to navigate to the frontend and backend. When going to the frontend, you can see a demo shop with sample data as in the following screenshot:

  11. The layout is responsive. When scaling your browser to a smaller width, the website will switch to the mobile layout like in the following screenshot:

How it works…

We have just created a fully functional Magento 1 store. The webshop is fully configured and filled with data about products, customers, and orders, just the data we need to migrate to Magento 2 (in the upcoming recipes).

When installing a new shop, you have to follow the installer. This interface creates a configuration file app/etc/local.xml. If the file doesn't exist, Magento will launch the installer wizard. If the file is there, Magento will run the shop.

With a valid local.xml file, it is technically possible to install a new Magento shop, but this is not recommended because some settings such as a backend user, time zone, and currency are not set. These are actions that you have to do manually when choosing for this method.

 

Creating a Magento 2 website


In the previous recipe, we created a Magento 1 website with sample data that we will use for an upgrade. In this recipe, we will do the same, but we will create a Magento 2 website with the sample data for Magento 2.

Getting ready

To install Magento 2, we need the newest tools to run that application. Make sure your webserver has the following stuff installed:

  • PHP 5.5 or higher

  • MySQL 5.6 or higher

  • Apache 2.2 or higher

  • Command line access

  • Composer

We can install Magento 2 in different ways. In this recipe, we will install Magento 2 using Composer. The advantage of this is that we can use GIT to add version control to our custom development.

How to do it...

  1. We will install Magento 2 with Composer. For this, we need authentication keys. With an account on the magento.com site, go to Developers | Secure keys in the My Account section. On this page, you can generate public and private keys that will be your username and password in the next step.

  2. To install Magento 2 with composer, we have to run the following command:

    composer create-project --repository-url=https://repo.magento.com magento/project-community-edition <installation_dir>
    
  3. You will be prompted for a username and password. The username is the public key and the password is the private key that we generated in the previous step. When the command has run, the installation directory will have the following structure:

    app
    bin
    CHANGELOG.md
    composer.json
    composer.lock
    CONTRIBUTING.md
    CONTRIBUTOR_LICENSE_AGREEMENT.html
    COPYING.txt
    dev
    .gitignore
    Gruntfile.js
    .htaccess
    .htaccess.sample
    index.php
    lib
    LICENSE_AFL.txt
    LICENSE.txt
    nginx.conf.sample
    package.json
    .php_cs
    php.ini.sample
    pub
    README.md
    setup
    .travis.yml
    update
    var
    vendor
    

    Tip

    Check that the user and group of these files are the same as your Apache user. One recommendation is to execute all the commands as your apache user.

  4. We have installed the codebase with composer. Now we can run the installation wizard. Open your browser and enter the URL of your site. You should see the following welcome screen:

  5. Hit the Agree and Setup Magento button and start the environment check.

  6. Click on Next and enter your database information as follows:

    • Database Server Host: The hostname or IP address of the database server

    • Database Server Username: The username of the database account

    • Database Server Password: The password for the account

    • Database Name: The name of the database

    • Table Prefix: Optionally, you can give a prefix for each table

  7. Go to the next step and check if the right information is filled for the URL part. In the advanced section, you can optionally configure HTTPS, apache rewrites, and your encryption key. For our test environment, we can leave these settings as they are configured.

    Note

    Make sure that the mod_rewrite option is enabled for the apache server. When not enabled, the URL rewrites will not work correctly.

  8. In the next step, you can configure your time zone, currency, and default language.

  9. In the last step, you can configure your administration account. After clicking on the Next button, you are ready to install. Click on the Install Now button and the installer will start. This will take some time because the installer will add the sample data during the installation. You can open the Console Log to see what is currently happening.

  10. When the installer is ready, you will see the following success message:

  11. Run the following commands in your Magento installation directory to configure the sample data:

    php bin/magento sampledata:deploy
    composer update
    php bin/magento setup:upgrade
    
  12. The preceding commands will download and install the sample data packages. Because they contain a lot of images, this could take some time. The setup:upgrade command will install the sample data, and this also takes some time.

  13. The installation of the webshop is now complete. You now have an up-and-running Magento 2 webshop. When you navigate to the category Gear | Bags, you should see something like in the following screenshot:

How it works...

We have now installed a Magento 2 website. Like we did in the previous recipe for Magento 1.9, we downloaded the codebase (using composer), created a database, and installed Magento.

For Magento 2, we used composer to download the codebase. Composer is a PHP dependency manager. All the dependencies are set in the composer.json file. For this recipe, there are the Magento and the magento-sample-data dependencies in the composer.json file. There is also a composer.lock file generated. In that file, the versions of the installed dependencies are stored.

Note

When working with GIT, we only have to commit the composer.json, composer.lock, and .gitignore files for a working Magento 2 project. When another person does a Git clone of the repository and runs the composer's install command, Magento 2 will be installed with the version that is in the composer.lock file.

The sample data for Magento 2 is now a script that will be executed after the installation of Magento. That script will add products, customers, orders, CMS data, and more configurations to populate the shop.

The shop is installed and the configuration settings (database, encryption key, and so on) are now stored in app/etc/env.php instead of in the app/etc/local.xml file in Magento 1.

There's more...

When installing Magento 2, here are some common issues that can occur and their fixes:

  • When you don't see CSS in your browser, you have to check the following things:

    • Make sure the pub/ folder is writable

    • Run the command php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy to generate the static content

  • You forget to install the sample data:

    • You can install the sample data after the installation of Magento with the command php bin/magento sampledata:deploy

  • The installation is not responding anymore:

    • This could be caused by an Apache timeout. If this occurs, you can maybe try the command-line installation. This works as follows:

To run the Magento installer from the command line, we can use the command php bin/magento setup:install. We have to add the following required parameters to the command to configure the installation:

  • base-url: The base URL, for example http://magento2.local/

  • db-host: The database host or IP address

  • db-user: The database username

  • db-name: The database name

  • db-password: The database password

  • admin-firstname: The first name of the administrator user

  • admin-lastname: The last name of the admin user

  • admin-email: The e-mail address of the admin user

  • admin-user: The username (login name) of the admin user

  • admin-password: The password for the admin user

  • language: The language of the shop

  • currency: The currency code of the shop

  • timezone: The time zone of the shop

  • use-rewrites: Whether to use the apache rewrites or not

  • use-sample-data: Install the sample data (optional)

Look at the following code for a working example of the install command:

php bin/magento setup:install --base-url=http://magento2.local/ --db-host=localhost --db-user=magento2 --db-name=magento2 --db-password=yourpassword --admin-firstname=John --admin-lastname=Doe --admin-email=john.doe@example.com --admin-user=admin --language=en_US --currency=USD --timezone=UTC --use-rewrites=1 
 

Preparing an upgrade from Magento 1


The differences between Magento 1 and Magento 2 are huge. The code has a whole new structure with a lot of improvements but there is one big disadvantage. What do I do if I want to upgrade my Magento 1 shop to a Magento 2 shop?

Magento created an upgrade tool that migrates the data from a Magento 1 database to the right structure for a Magento 2 database.

The custom modules in your Magento 1 shop will not work in Magento 2. It is possible that some of your modules will have a Magento 2 version, and depending on the module, the module author will have a migration tool to migrate the data that is in the module.

Getting ready

Before we get started, make sure you have an empty (without sample data) Magento 2 installation with the same version as the Migration tool that is available at:

https://github.com/magento/data-migration-tool-ce.

How to do it...

  1. In your Magento 2 version (with the same version as the migration tool), run the following commands:

    composer config repositories.data-migration-tool git https://github.com/magento/data-migration-tool-ce
    composer require magento/data-migration-tool:2.0.0
    
  2. Install Magento 2 with an empty database by running the installer. Make sure you configure it with the right time zone and currencies.

  3. When these steps are done, you can test the tool by running the following command:

    php bin/magento migrate:data --help
    
  4. The next thing is creating the configuration files. Examples of the configuration files are in vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/<version>. We can create a copy of this folder where we can set our custom configuration values. For a Magento 1.9 installation, we have to run the following cp command:

    cp –R vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ce/1.9.1.0/ vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ce/packt-migration
    
  5. Open the vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ce/packt-migration/config.xml.dist file and search for the source/database and destination/database tags. Change the values of these database settings to your database settings like in the following code:

    <source>
      <database host="localhost" name="magento1" user="root"/>
    </source>
    <destination>
      <database host="localhost" name="magento2_migration" user="root"/>
    </destination>
  6. Rename that file to config.xml with the following command:

    mv vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ce/packt-migration/config.xml.dist vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ce/packt-migration/config.xml
    

How it works...

By adding a composer dependency, we installed the data migration tool for Magento 2 in the codebase. This migration tool is a Magento console command that will handle the migration steps from a Magento 1 shop.

In the etc folder of the migration module, there is a sample configuration of an empty Magento 1.9 shop.

If you want to migrate an existing Magento 1 shop, you have to customize these configuration files so it matches your preferred state.

In the next recipe, we will learn how we can use the script to start the migration.

 

Upgrading the database


In the previous recipe, we configured the database migration tool. In this recipe, we will run the migration tool so that we can migrate parts from a Magento 1 shop to a Magento 2 shop.

Getting ready

You need a Magento 1 website and a Magento 2 website. The Magento 2 website needs to have the database migration tool installed and configured as described in the previous recipe.

In this recipe, we will do a migration from a clean Magento 1 site, to a Magento 2 site without sample data.

We did a migration from a clean Magento 1 database with some test products. Make sure you have a cleanly installed Magento 1 shop with some test data (products, orders, and so on) in it.

How to do it...

  1. First we need to make sure that the database settings are correct in the vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ce/packt-migration/config.xml file. Open that file and check that the database credentials are correct. We created this file in the previous recipe:

    <source version="1.9.1">
    <database host="localhost" name="magento1_migration" user="root"/>
    </source>
    <destination version="2.0.0.0">
    <database host="localhost" name="magento2_migration" user="root"/>
    </destination>

    Note

    If you have a database prefix in your source or destination database, you can optionally configure source_prefix and dest_prefix in the <options> section of the same configuration file.

    Tip

    Test the migration first with a clean Magento 1.9 database. The mapping that we will use in this recipe is for a clean Magento 1.9 installation. With an existing shop, you will have custom attributes and entities that need more configuration to make the migration work.

  2. If these settings are correct, we can run the upgrade tool. Run the following command:

    php bin/magento migrate:data --help
    
  3. This gives us the following output:

  4. To start or test a migration, we have to run the following command:

    php bin/magento migrate:data vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ce/packt-migration/config.xml
    
  5. The migration will start and will give the following output:

  6. The migration is now complete. If you check your database for the Magento 2 website, you will see that the data (products, categories, and so on) is migrated from Magento 1.

    Tip

    If you want to rerun the migration tool, you have to remove the var/migration-tool-progress.lock file.

  7. We can also migrate the settings from the Magento 1 website. To do this, you have to replace the data parameter in the command using settings.

  8. To check if the upgrade works, you have to look at the data of the Magento 2 installation. We can check the following things in the backend:

    • The orders (Sales | Orders)

    • The products (Products | Catalog)

    • The customers (Customers | All Customers)

  9. You can also check in the database if you look at the following tables:

    • sales_order

    • customer_entity

    • catalog_product_entity

    • url_rewrite

How it works...

When the migration tool starts, it starts checking all the configurations that are in the configuration files of the migration tool. If there are more things available in the Magento 1 database than the things that are configured, the migration tool will give a notification and stop the migration.

It's likely that every existing Magento 1 shop works with custom attributes, custom entities, and so on. Each entity, attribute, and so on needs to be declared in the configuration files.

The most time-consuming part of a migration is to create a good configuration file so that the migration tool won't fail on missing stuff. It is on you to decide what to ignore and what to migrate. If the configuration files are valid, the migration will start and the data will come into the Magento 2 database. The same principle applies when migrating the settings, but you have to think about whether you want it.

Note

With the migration tool, it is only possible to migrate data and settings. The code of Magento 1 modules will not work in Magento 2. So for your modules, you need to see if there is a Magento 2 version/alternative available.

There's more...

In this recipe, we did a migration of a clean Magento 1 installation to a clean Magento 2 installation. However almost every running Magento 1 shop is not clean. It contains custom attributes, custom modules, and a custom configuration.

When migrating such a shop to a new shop, the migration is a bit more complex. The first question is: What needs to be migrated? With the tool, you can migrate every entity, from products, customers, and orders to reviews, settings, and more.

If you want to skip data that must be migrated, you can use the map.xml file. If you open the file vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/ce-to-ce/packt-migration/map.xml, you see that a lot of entities are ignored in the map/source/document_rules tag.

Tip

If you want to change something in the map.xml file, you have to make sure that the right map.xml file is loaded. This file is configured in the config.xml file (where you did your database configuration). In that file, you have to look for the XML tag config/options/map_file.

If you have an error such as Source documents not mapped, you have to add the configuration for these entities in the map/source/document_rules tag of the map.xml file. If the error is something like Destination documents not mapped, you have to add configuration in the map/destination/document tag of the map.xml file.

To solve errors such as Source fields not mapped you have to add configuration in the map-eav.xml file.

See also

Migrating configuration files is the most time consuming part of a data migration. If you want more information on the migration tool, you can have a look at the Magento Migration Whitepaper, available at http://magento.com/resources/magento-2-migration-whitepaper.

 

Using an IDE


Writing good code starts with a good development environment. An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is the main part of a good development environment. NetBeans is a free and open source PHP editor that can be used for Magento development. In this recipe, we will set up a Magento 2 project in NetBeans.

Getting ready

Install the latest version of NetBeans IDE on your computer. You can download it from the following URL:

https://netbeans.org/downloads/

For PHP development, you need to download the HTML5 & PHP bundle.

How to do it...

  1. To create a new project, open NetBeans and navigate to File | New Project.

  2. A window like the one in the following screenshot will appear on your screen. Click on PHP and PHP Application with Existing Sources.

  3. Click on Next and configure the following settings:

    • Source Folder: This field is set to the location of your Magento code (like /var/www/html/magento2/)

    • Project Name: The NetBeans project name is entered in this field

    • PHP Version: This field is set to PHP 5.5

    • Default Encoding: This field is set to UTF-8

  4. In the next screenshot, you can see how everything is configured:

    Tip

    When you are working with a version control system like GIT, it is recommended that you check the checkbox. Put NetBeans metadata into a separate directory. If not checked, a .nbproject folder is created in your Magento root, and you don't want to have that folder in your version control system. Another possibility is to add the .nbproject folder in the .gitignore file.

  5. Click on Next and configure the final settings:

    • Run as: If you are developing on a local PC, choose Local Web Server

    • Project URL: The URL of your website

    • Index file: Set this to index.php

    The settings are shown in the following screenshot:

  6. Click on the Finish button and your NetBeans project is ready. You can now start developing.

There's more...

In this recipe, we used the free code editor NetBeans, but there are also some other good alternatives on the market, such as:

  • PHPStorm

  • Eclipse with PDT (PHP Development Tools)

  • Zend Studio

 

Writing clean code with PHP MD and PHP CS


Maintaining clean code is much more efficient than maintaining spaghetti code, but writing clean code is not as easy as it sounds. These days there are some tools that help you with writing clean code, such as PHPMD and PHP_CodeSniffer.

PHPMD stands for PHP Mess Detector; this tool will check your code on complexity and how variables are used and will detect some possible bugs. It goes a bit further than the syntax check in your IDE.

PHP_CodeSniffer or PHPCS checks your code on coding standards such as PSR-1 and PSR-2.

Getting ready

We will install PHPMD and PHP_CodeSniffer in our development environment. Make sure you have command-line access to your development environment.

How to do it...

  1. Before installing PHPMD and PHP_CodeSniffer, we have to make sure that PHP is installed on our development machine. Especially if you are developing on a remote server, it could be that PHP is not installed.

  2. Download and install PHPMD. Depending on your OS, the protocol could be different. You can find instructions at:

    http://phpmd.org/download/index.html

  3. Download and install PHP_CodeSniffer. You can find the installation instructions at:

    https://github.com/squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer

  4. Everything is installed, so we can run a test for PHPMD. For the PHPMD command, these are the required options:

    • Filename or directory

    • The format of the report

    • The ruleset

  5. Let's run the following command to check the file on clean code and output text:

    phpmd app/code/Magento/Cms/Model/Observer.php text cleancode
    
  6. It gives us the following output:

    /var/www/magento2/app/code/Magento/Cms/Model/Observer.php:70    Avoid using static access to class '\Magento\Cms\Helper\Page' in method 'noCookies'
    /var/www/magento2/app/code/Magento/Cms/Model/Observer.php:71    Avoid using static access to class '\Magento\Store\Model\ScopeInterface' in method 'noCookies'.
    /var/www/magento2/app/code/Magento/Cms/Model/Observer.php:77    The method noCookies uses an else expression. Else is never necessary and you can simplify the code to work without else.
    
  7. There are a lot of errors, but Magento 2 defines its own rules for PHPMD. To run a test with these rules, we can run the following command:

    phpmd app/code/Magento/Cms/Model/Observer.php text dev/tests/static/testsuite/Magento/Test/Php/_files/phpmd/ruleset.xml
    
  8. This command gives empty output, which means that this file is valid.

  9. We will now run a test on the same file with PHP_CodeSniffer. With the next command, we will run a test on the same file we used for PHPMD.

    phpcs app/code/Magento/Cms/Model/Observer.php
    
  10. This test gives us the following output:

    FILE: /var/www/magento2/app/code/Magento/Cms/Model/Observer.php
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    FOUND 22 ERRORS AND 2 WARNINGS AFFECTING 12 LINES
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
      5 | WARNING | [ ] PHP version not specified
      5 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @category tag in file comment
      5 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @package tag in file comment
      5 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @author tag in file comment
      5 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @license tag in file comment
      5 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @link tag in file comment
     10 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @category tag in class comment
     10 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @package tag in class comment
     10 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @author tag in class comment
     10 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @license tag in class comment
     10 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing @link tag in class comment
     18 | ERROR   | [ ] Protected member variable "_cmsPage" must not be
        |         |     prefixed with an underscore
     25 | ERROR   | [ ] Protected member variable "_scopeConfig" must not
        |         |     be prefixed with an underscore
     27 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing short description in doc comment
     28 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing parameter comment
     28 | ERROR   | [x] Expected 27 spaces after parameter type; 1 found
     29 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing parameter comment
     42 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing parameter comment
     42 | ERROR   | [x] Tag value indented incorrectly; expected 2 spaces
        |         |     but found 1
     43 | ERROR   | [ ] Tag cannot be grouped with parameter tags in a
        |         |     doc comment
     62 | ERROR   | [ ] Missing parameter comment
     62 | ERROR   | [x] Tag value indented incorrectly; expected 2 spaces
        |         |     but found 1
     63 | ERROR   | [ ] Tag cannot be grouped with parameter tags in a
        |         |     doc comment
     78 | WARNING | [ ] Line exceeds 85 characters; contains 94
        |         |     characters
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    PHPCBF CAN FIX THE 3 MARKED SNIFF VIOLATIONS AUTOMATICALLY
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    Time: 28ms; Memory: 3.75Mb
    

    Note

    If the phpmd command is not working, you have to find the path to the phpmd executable and run it from there.

  11. When we specify the ruleset of Magento 2, we have the following command:

    phpcs app/code/Magento/Cms/Model/Observer.php --standard=dev/tests/static/testsuite/Magento/Test/Php/_files/phpcs/ruleset.xml
    
  12. This command gives us the following output:

    FILE: /var/www/magento2/app/code/Magento/Cms/Model/Observer.php
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    FOUND 5 ERRORS AFFECTING 5 LINES
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
     18 | ERROR | Missing variable doc comment
     25 | ERROR | Missing variable doc comment
     31 | ERROR | Missing function doc comment
     45 | ERROR | Missing function doc comment
     65 | ERROR | Missing function doc comment
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    Time: 35ms; Memory: 3.75Mb
    

How it works...

PHPMD and PHP_CodeSniffer are tools that checks PHP files on code style. These tools have defined their default rulesets for common usage.

Magento has created its own rulesets; they can be found in the directory dev/tests/static/testsuite/Magento/Test/Php/_files/phpcs/ruleset.xml.

When developing custom code in Magento 2, it is recommended that you configure these rulesets when working with PHPMD and PHP_CodeSniffer.

There's more...

Some IDE's have built-in support for PHPMD and PHP_CodeSniffer. These plugins will run a test when saving a file.

In NetBeans, you have the phpcsmd plugin that allows you to integrate these tools in your IDE. For more details visit the following URL:

http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/40282/phpmd-php-codesniffer-plugin

In PHPStorm, there is built-in support for PHPMD and PHP_CodeSniffer. If it is configured, there is a color indicator that says how clean your code is. More information can be found at https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/help/using-php-mess-detector.html.

Tip

When configuring PHPMD and PHP_CodeSniffer in an IDE, these tools and PHP need to be installed on the machine on which the IDE is running.

Latest Reviews (5 reviews total)
Komlab Srl Via San Marco 11- Palazzo Tendenza - Net Center 35129 Padova
Good price and good offer!
Good content for a magento2 dev.
Magento 2 Development Cookbook
Unlock this book and the full library FREE for 7 days
Start now