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5 PHP Tools to make your life more enjoyable.

David J Eddy on August 02, 2018

  Tools; they can make your life amazingly productive or hellishly frustrating. Over the past decade I have had the privilege to use a wide rang...
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Aleksi Kauppila • Edited

Good list. I would also add phpstan as a must-have for static analysis. GrumPHP is also useful for sniffing commits and can be configured to run php-cs, php-md, unit tests, phpstan etc etc.

Edit: this one's obvious but can't do jack without Composer!

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David J Eddy

Total agree! Composer, phpstan and grumphp are all three amazing tools.

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Lars Frantzen

Very nice summary David! We basically use exactly this stack. In addition we make heavy use of Codeception, which fits perfectly into this stack (including PHPStorm support). That allows us to also have browser tests integrated in one stack so that we could get rid of all heavy external testing tools.

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David J Eddy

Thank you @frantzen , glad you liked the article. I as well have used Codeception extensively in the past. If you dig into it enough it eventually turns into PHPUnit; per Codeceptions own documentation" Codeception uses PHPUnit as a backend for running tests. Thus, any PHPUnit test can be added to Codeception test suite and then executed." - codeception.com/docs-1.8/06-UnitTests

Thank you again for the comment! :D

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David J Eddy

UPDATE: Added a Link List on my blog with PHP Tools. blog.davidjeddy.com/?page_id=56 . I will update this as more tools come into my viewing range. Thank you all again for the great suggestions!