PHP_CodeSniffer Standards Composer Installer Plugin

This composer installer plugin allows for easy installation of PHP_CodeSniffer coding standards (rulesets).

No more symbolic linking of directories, checking out repositories on specific locations or changing the phpcs configuration.

Usage

Installation can be done with Composer, by requiring this package as a development dependency:

composer require --dev dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer

When using Composer 2.2 or higher, Composer will ask for your permission to allow this plugin to execute code. For this plugin to be functional, permission needs to be granted.

When permission has been granted, the following snippet will automatically be added to your composer.json file by Composer:

{
    "config": {
        "allow-plugins": {
            "dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer": true
        }
    }
}

When using Composer < 2.2, you can add the permission flag ahead of the upgrade to Composer 2.2, by running:

composer config allow-plugins.dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer true

That's it.

Compatibility

This plugin is compatible with:

• PHP 5.4+, 7.x, and 8.x (Support for PHP v8 is available since v0.7.0)
• Composer 1.x and 2.x (Support for Composer v2 is available since v0.7.0)
• PHP_CodeSniffer 2.x and 3.x (Support for PHP_CodeSniffer v3 is available since v0.4.0)

ℹ️ Please Note: Composer treats minor releases below 1.0.0 as major releases. So version 0.7.x (or higher) of this plugin must be explicitly set as version constraint when using Composer 2.x or PHP 8.0. In other words: using ^0.6 will not work with Composer 2.x or PHP 8.0.

How it works

Basically, this plugin executes the following steps:

• This plugin searches for phpcodesniffer-standard packages in all of your currently installed Composer packages.
• Matching packages and the project itself are scanned for PHP_CodeSniffer rulesets.
• The plugin will call PHP_CodeSniffer and configure the installed_paths option.

Example project

The following is an example Composer project and has included multiple phpcodesniffer-standard packages.

{
    "name": "example/project",
    "description": "Just an example project",
    "type": "project",
    "require": {},
    "require-dev": {
        "dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer": "*",
        "object-calisthenics/phpcs-calisthenics-rules": "*",
        "phpcompatibility/php-compatibility": "*",
        "wp-coding-standards/wpcs": "*"
    },
    "config": {
        "allow-plugins": {
            "dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer": true
        }
    }
}

After running composer install PHP_CodeSniffer just works:

$ ./vendor/bin/phpcs -i
The installed coding standards are MySource, PEAR, PSR1, PSR2, PSR12, Squiz, Zend, ObjectCalisthenics,
PHPCompatibility, WordPress, WordPress-Core, WordPress-Docs and WordPress-Extra

Calling the plugin directly

In some circumstances, it is desirable to call this plugin's functionality directly. For instance, during development or in CI environments.

As the plugin requires Composer to work, direct calls need to be wired through a project's composer.json.

This is done by adding a call to the Plugin::run function in the script section of the composer.json:

{
    "scripts": {
        "install-codestandards": [
            "PHPCSStandards\\Composer\\Plugin\\Installers\\PHPCodeSniffer\\Plugin::run"
        ]
    }
}

The command can then be called using composer run-script install-codestandards or referenced from other script configurations, as follows:

{
    "scripts": {
        "install-codestandards": [
            "PHPCSStandards\\Composer\\Plugin\\Installers\\PHPCodeSniffer\\Plugin::run"
        ],
        "post-install-cmd": [
            "@install-codestandards"
        ]
    }
}

For more details about Composer scripts, please refer to the section on scripts in the Composer manual.

Changing the Coding Standards search depth

By default, this plugin searches up for Coding Standards up to three directories deep. In most cases, this should be sufficient. However, this plugin allows you to customize the search depth setting if needed.

{
    "extra": {
        "phpcodesniffer-search-depth": 5
    }
}

Caveats

When this plugin is installed globally, composer will load the global plugin rather than the one from the local repository. Despite this behavior being documented in the composer manual, it could potentially confuse as another version of the plugin could be run and not the one specified by the project.

Developing Coding Standards

Coding standard can be developed normally, as documented by PHP_CodeSniffer, in the Coding Standard Tutorial.

Create a composer package of your coding standard by adding a composer.json file.

{
  "name" : "acme/phpcodesniffer-our-standards",
  "description" : "Package contains all coding standards of the Acme company",
  "require" : {
    "php" : ">=5.4.0",
    "squizlabs/php_codesniffer" : "^3.6"
  },
  "type" : "phpcodesniffer-standard"
}

Requirements:

• The repository may contain one or more standards.
• Each standard can have a separate directory no deeper than 3 levels from the repository root.
• The package type must be phpcodesniffer-standard. Without this, the plugin will not trigger.

Requiring the plugin from within your coding standard

If your coding standard itself depends on additional external PHPCS standards, this plugin can make life easier on your end-users by taking care of the installation of all standards - yours and your dependencies - for them.

This can help reduce the number of support questions about setting the installed_paths, as well as simplify your standard's installation instructions.

For this to work, make sure your external standard adds this plugin to the composer.json config via require, not require-dev.

⚠️ Your end-user may already require-dev this plugin and/or other external standards used by your end-users may require this plugin as well.

To prevent your end-users getting into "dependency hell", make sure to make the version requirement for this plugin flexible.

As, for now, this plugin is still regarded as "unstable" (version < 1.0), remember that Composer treats unstable minors as majors and will not be able to resolve one config requiring this plugin at version ^0.5, while another requires it at version ^0.6. Either allow multiple minors or use * as the version requirement.

Some examples of flexible requirements which can be used:

composer require dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer:"*"
composer require dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer:"0.*"
composer require dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer:"^0.4.1 || ^0.5 || ^0.6 || ^0.7"

Changelog

This repository does not contain a CHANGELOG.md file, however, we do publish a changelog on each release using the GitHub releases functionality.

Contributing

This is an active open-source project. We are always open to people who want to use the code or contribute to it.

We've set up a separate document for our contribution guidelines.

Thank you for being involved! 😍

Authors & contributors

The original idea and setup of this repository is by Franck Nijhof, employee @ Dealerdirect.

For a full list of all author and/or contributors, check the contributors page.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016-2022 Dealerdirect B.V. and contributors Copyright (c) 2022 PHPCSStandards and contributors

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.