PHP Insights: Analyze the code quality of PHP projects

First, thanks @MindGods for sharing PHP Insights on Hacker News!

To answer some question on the comments:

The goal of PHP Insights is not to perform type checking, for that we already have PHPStan and Psalm. And both already work great by default.

PHP Insights wraps tools like PHP CS, or PHP CS Fixer, putting each check/sniff within a specific category: A missing blank space is related to coding style. On the other end, having mutable objects can be considered a code quality problem.

So, once we have those checks performed, we show a well-designed console interface that shows developers the results per category in a human-readable form: with a score, percentages, etc.

Besides, it's designed to work out-of-the-box with Laravel, Symfony, and others. In other words, we have prepared a set of presets, that represent the conventions per framework, so when people launch PHP Insights within a Magento2 project, their project will be analyzed following the Magento conventions.

Long live PHP!

1. https://phpstan.org/ 2. https://psalm.dev/

PHP is truly a defining technology of our age. For all the tongue-in-cheekiness of my comment, it’s a matter of fact that several giant web properties were built with PHP and have had irrefutable global impact.

Will give it a try.

> src/Grouchy/MessageStream.php:66: Your function is too long. Currently using 40 lines. Can be up to 20 lines.

sigh.

One of the annoyances of modern PHP practices is the tendency to write one class, per file, which extends or implements one other class, and adds one or two functions to it. Every single logical abstraction in a PHP project can have somewhere between one to thirty different classes associated with it, and larger PHP projects end up with a thousand or more files. All of this is enabled by composer's PSR-4 autoloading support, so as long as you give your classes the right kind of names and put the files in the right places, you don't have to think about what it means to hit the disk that many times on a page load. Consequently, there are more and more harebrained caching schemes showing up to kind of paper over this architectural problem. And tracking some unexpected behavior through that many different pieces just suuuuuuucks.

I fully get that god objects are bad. But metrics like these are making complex PHP projects worse, not better. PHP is not, and should not be, Java. Java has already shown us what the end result of these practices looks like. Let's not do that.

I desperately want a good code analysis tool for PHP: something that can look behind whether there's exactly one space before a '*' in a comment block and into deeper things like, "hey, on this line over here you tried to call a function that doesn't exist in the class the variable is supposed to be referencing".

Some further reading:

Aim small, miss small: https://www.deconstructconf.com/2018/stuart-halloway-aim-sma...

Composition over inheritance: https://github.com/jupeter/clean-code-php#prefer-composition...

Small functions considered harmful: https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/small-functions-considered...

(There were a few other minor misbehaviors in this tool's output, but I'm less disappointed by those.)

edit: Sometimes I forget to mention the things I like about a project. The output this produces is super clean and easy to navigate, I liked it a lot. The dashboard presentation at the beginning of the output is super cool. It's a great idea to have a single thing you can drop in that sets up phpcs and similar tools with reasonable defaults. The developer for PHP Insights probably didn't make any of the decisions that resulted in line counts or function counts being part of the output. My disappointment was only that I got my hopes up that it was something different from what it was.

(And continues with Architecture, Complexity and Style.)