Adding Code Sniffer with Magento Standards to PHP Storm

Keeping inline with the Magento coding standards is always good practice when working but it can often be hard to stay on top of it, this is where PHP Code Sniffer comes in.

Lets get setup, install PHP Code sniffer if you haven’t already yum install php-pear-PHP-CodeSniffer.noarch

Next, a sanity check that every thing is working phpcs -v #Output #Registering sniffs in the PEAR standard… DONE (27 sniffs registered) #Creating file list… DONE (0 files in queue)

Now we are ready to go and get our Magento coding standards to use sniffer with, we’ll use composer for this composer global require “magento-ecg/coding-standard”

Installing the package globally is my preferred way of working, the rule set will be used with all my Magento projects and if I need to update them I only need to update the global composer repository with one command rather than updating for every single project.

Now it’s time to tell PHP Storm where to find our sniffer file. In PHP Storm go to settings->Languages & Frameworks->PHP->Code Sniffer

Under the configuration select menu choose local hit the more (elipsis …) button then choose to browse to your phpcs path and browse to your installed sniffer file, in my case the file was located in /bin/phpcs. With this done, hit the validate button and you should see green.

Back on the main settings menu, navigate to editor->inspections->PHP and enable the Code Sniffer checkbox if it isn’t already. Choose custom as the coding standard and hit the ellipsis (…) button to browse to your intended rule set.

In our case, we installed the Magento rule set earlier to our global composer repository which is located in the home directory. /home/<USER>/.composer/vendor/magento-ecg/coding-standard/Ecg

We’re all set to go, in PHP Storm you can now choose to inspect code in various places such as individual files, the entire project or individual directories. I prefer to stick to the directories that I can currently working with such as the module within the namespace.