How To Fix Laravel & PHP Code Styles Locally

Hey Guys, this is my first article for the year 2022. I have been "pro clean code" and I have been reading while looking out for what makes a codebase clean and maintainable.

In this article, I am going to show you how you can fix your code using the Laravel code style and PHPFixer.

What Is A Code Style

According to Wikipedia, programming style, also known as code style, is a set of rules or guidelines used when writing the source code for a computer program.

It is often claimed that following a particular programming style will help programmers read and understand source code conforming to the style, and help to avoid introducing errors.

Install PHPFixer

To begin, we need is to install PHP Fixer as a global composer package on our local machine and we can fix the code style of our codebase via the terminal.

composer global require friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer

Fixing Our Codebase

To fix the code style of our codebase, we need to navigate to the project directory and run the fix command.

cd ~/path-to-project

Now to fix out the app directory of our Laravel project, we will run the command below.

~/.composer/vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer fix app

Command Alias

I have created an alias of this command which allows me to use the fix-style command on my local machine.

To create your own alias, append the code below to .bash_profile or .zshrc on your local machine.

fix-style(){
  ~/.composer/vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer fix $1
}

Save the file and run the command below to get your terminal up to date. You might need to restart your terminal.

source .bash_profile
source .zshrc

Now you can now run the fix command with a human readable command.

fix-style app

Using Laravel Code Style

To make sure that our fixes follow the Laravel code style, we need to add the Laravel code style rules inside our code base.

Create a .php-cs-fixer.dist.php file inside your project root directory and update with the rules below.

<?php

$globalComposerPath = str_replace("bin/php-cs-fixer", 'autoload.php', $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);

require $globalComposerPath;

use PhpCsFixer\Config;
use PhpCsFixer\Finder;

$rules = [
    'array_syntax' => ['syntax' => 'short'],
    'blank_line_after_namespace' => true,
    'blank_line_after_opening_tag' => true,
    'braces' => true,
    'cast_spaces' => true,
    'concat_space' => [
        'spacing' => 'none',
    ],
    'declare_equal_normalize' => true,
    'elseif' => true,
    'encoding' => true,
    'full_opening_tag' => true,
    'fully_qualified_strict_types' => true, // added by Shift
    'function_declaration' => true,
    'function_typehint_space' => true,
    'heredoc_to_nowdoc' => true,
    'include' => true,
    'increment_style' => ['style' => 'post'],
    'indentation_type' => true,
    'linebreak_after_opening_tag' => true,
    'line_ending' => true,
    'lowercase_cast' => true,
    'lowercase_keywords' => true,
    'lowercase_static_reference' => true, // added from Symfony
    'magic_method_casing' => true, // added from Symfony
    'magic_constant_casing' => true,
    'method_argument_space' => true,
    'native_function_casing' => true,
    'no_alias_functions' => true,
    'no_extra_blank_lines' => [
        'tokens' => [
            'extra',
            'throw',
            'use',
            'use_trait',
        ],
    ],
    'no_blank_lines_after_class_opening' => true,
    'no_blank_lines_after_phpdoc' => true,
    'no_closing_tag' => true,
    'no_empty_phpdoc' => true,
    'no_empty_statement' => true,
    'no_leading_import_slash' => true,
    'no_leading_namespace_whitespace' => true,
    'no_mixed_echo_print' => [
        'use' => 'echo',
    ],
    'no_multiline_whitespace_around_double_arrow' => true,
    'multiline_whitespace_before_semicolons' => [
        'strategy' => 'no_multi_line',
    ],
    'no_short_bool_cast' => true,
    'no_singleline_whitespace_before_semicolons' => true,
    'no_spaces_after_function_name' => true,
    'no_spaces_inside_parenthesis' => true,
    'no_trailing_comma_in_list_call' => true,
    'no_trailing_comma_in_singleline_array' => true,
    'no_trailing_whitespace' => true,
    'no_trailing_whitespace_in_comment' => true,
    'no_unreachable_default_argument_value' => true,
    'no_useless_return' => true,
    'no_whitespace_before_comma_in_array' => true,
    'no_whitespace_in_blank_line' => true,
    'normalize_index_brace' => true,
    'not_operator_with_successor_space' => true,
    'object_operator_without_whitespace' => true,
    'phpdoc_indent' => true,
    'phpdoc_no_access' => true,
    'phpdoc_no_package' => true,
    'phpdoc_no_useless_inheritdoc' => true,
    'phpdoc_scalar' => true,
    'phpdoc_single_line_var_spacing' => true,
    'phpdoc_summary' => true,
    'phpdoc_to_comment' => true,
    'phpdoc_trim' => true,
    'phpdoc_types' => true,
    'phpdoc_var_without_name' => true,
    'self_accessor' => true,
    'short_scalar_cast' => true,
    'simplified_null_return' => false, // disabled by Shift
    'single_blank_line_at_eof' => true,
    'single_blank_line_before_namespace' => true,
    'single_import_per_statement' => true,
    'single_line_after_imports' => true,
    'single_line_comment_style' => [
        'comment_types' => ['hash'],
    ],
    'single_quote' => true,
    'space_after_semicolon' => true,
    'standardize_not_equals' => true,
    'switch_case_semicolon_to_colon' => true,
    'switch_case_space' => true,
    'ternary_operator_spaces' => true,
    'trim_array_spaces' => true,
    'unary_operator_spaces' => true,
    'whitespace_after_comma_in_array' => true,

    // php-cs-fixer 3: Renamed rules
    'constant_case' => ['case' => 'lower'],
    'general_phpdoc_tag_rename' => true,
    'phpdoc_inline_tag_normalizer' => true,
    'phpdoc_tag_type' => true,
    'psr_autoloading' => true,
    'trailing_comma_in_multiline' => ['elements' => ['arrays']],

    // php-cs-fixer 3: Changed options
    'binary_operator_spaces' => [
        'default' => 'single_space',
        'operators' => ['=>' => null],
    ],
    'blank_line_before_statement' => [
        'statements' => ['return'],
    ],
    'class_attributes_separation' => [
        'elements' => [
            'const' => 'one',
            'method' => 'one',
            'property' => 'one',
        ],
    ],
    'class_definition' => [
        'multi_line_extends_each_single_line' => true,
        'single_item_single_line' => true,
        'single_line' => true,
    ],
    'ordered_imports' => [
        'sort_algorithm' => 'alpha',
    ],

    // php-cs-fixer 3: Removed rootless options (*)
    'no_unneeded_control_parentheses' => [
        'statements' => ['break', 'clone', 'continue', 'echo_print', 'return', 'switch_case', 'yield'],
    ],
    'no_spaces_around_offset' => [
        'positions' => ['inside', 'outside'],
    ],
    'visibility_required' => [
        'elements' => ['property', 'method', 'const'],
    ],
];

$finder = Finder::create()
    ->in([
        __DIR__.'/app',
        __DIR__.'/config',
        __DIR__.'/database',
        __DIR__.'/resources',
        __DIR__.'/routes',
        __DIR__.'/tests',
    ])
    ->name('*.php')
    ->notName('*.blade.php')
    ->ignoreDotFiles(true)
    ->ignoreVCS(true);

return (new Config())
    ->setFinder($finder)
    ->setRules($rules)
    ->setRiskyAllowed(true)
    ->setUsingCache(true);

Now we just need to run fix-style with no path attached and all our code style errors will be fixed.

fix-style

I created a repository that contains the Laravel code style rule on GitHub. You can fork it and do as occasion serves you.