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In the old days, PHP applications were written in a loop: make a change, hit refresh in the browser, manually test, find a bug, fix the bug, and repeat. Thankfully, there’s been a tremendous evolution in PHP over the past decade, and we have quality assurance tools like PHPUnit. But in the last few years we’ve gained quality tooling that some thought would never be possible: static analysis. Which brings us to our fifth point: modern applications should use tools like static analysis for quality assurance.
PHP 7 brought about a component in PHP known as the abstract syntax tree (AST). The AST is basically a tree of all the commands in your code, that PHP uses to tokenize and execute your application. When exposed to the outside world, it can be examined, and evaluated, for errors in the code. This is effectively what static code analyzers like Psalm and PHPStan do – evaluate the code for errors.
The types of errors that can be detected are numerous, but are mainly focused on type errors, logic errors and other similar types of errors. The benefits are numerous: you can quickly identify potential and actual bugs in your code, no matter how old or legacy the code base, in an instant.
The first time you run one of these tools against your code you’re liable to receive a significant amount of feedback. Don’t fret; this is normal. Especially if your project is legacy, there’s a good chance there are plenty of bugs that haven’t been found yet, especially if you lack tests. But knowledge is power; once you know, you can go about fixing the bugs you encounter.
You can check out PHPStan at https://phpstan.org/ and Psalm at https://psalm.dev/
Posted on 12/29/2020 at 9:00 am
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| « Day 6: It’s Friday Afternoon; Is Your Code Deployed Yet? | Day 4: Continuous Improvement » |