Setting up sublime-phpcs for PHP development in Sublime Text

This is a plugin for Sublime Text which provides checkstyle reports using the following tools (all optional):

Linter (php -l). This provides a convenient way to perform only a syntax check on the given PHP code.
PHP CodeSniffer 1.3+ (phpcs). It tokenizes PHP, JavaScript and CSS files to detect violations of a defined coding standard.
PHP Mess Detector 1.4+ (phpmd). It detects and reports various potential problems with the code like possible bugs, suboptimal code, overcomplicated expressions and unused parameters, methods, properties.
Scheck 0.23+ (scheck, part of Facebook’s pfff toolchain). This will help you find stupid mistakes like a typo in your code.

You can also configure the plugin to fix the issues using either

PHP Coding Standards Fixer 0.2+ (php-cs-fixer). It can fix most issues in your code when you want to follow the PHP coding standards as defined in the PSR-1 and PSR-2 documents and many more.
or PHP Code Beautifier 2.2.0+ (phpcbf). It can automatically correct coding standard violations.

This plugin has been tested on:

Mac OS X 10.8.2
Ubuntu 11.10
Windows 7
Sublime Text 2
Sublime Text 3

Install sublime-phpcs

Using Sublime Text’s Package Control (recommended)
Preferences -> Package Control -> Install Package -> Phpcs
Or via git checkout in Sublime Text packages
Simply checkout the git repo into ~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text [VERSION NUMBER]/Packages/ for MacOSX or the equivalent folder on Windows or Linux.

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Sublime\ Text\ 2/Packages/
git clone git://github.com/benmatselby/sublime-phpcs.git Phpcs

Install dependencies

Make sure you have php installed on your system and check that you can use it directly-

php -v
    PHP 5.6.28 (cli) (built: Dec  6 2016 12:38:54)
    Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
    Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies

Now you need to have the latest composer installed. Use the provided link to move it globally.
Now install the PHP CodeSniffer, PHP Mess Detector, PHP CS Fixer and PHP Code Beautifier globally. You can also follow the links to see the install instructions for each.

composer global require squizlabs/php_codesniffer
composer global require phpmd/phpmd
composer global require friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer

Please note the absolute path of all the installed packages (On a Mac/Linux based environment), you can use:

which phpcs
which phpmd
which php-cs-fixer
which phpcbf

Now install Scheck dependencies.
- Make sure you have git installed.
- Follow the instructions here for generic, macosx and linux to install only these two packages- Ocaml and camlp4. You do not need the other packages like GTK, Cairo, SWI-prolog or Java for scheck. For macosx, use homebrew

# for macosx using homebrew
brew install objective-caml camlp4

# for fedora, you may need to install these too
yum install ocaml-camlp4 ocaml-camlp4-devel perl-pod-usage

Now install Scheck. If you follow the instructions mentioned in their project, you can download and setup the entire pfff set of tools. But for our case, we just need the scheck part. So, follow these instructions to get just that.
After following the steps, you’ll find a file called scheck in your cloned repo. Please note the absolute path of that as you’ll need it later.

# clone their github repository somewhere
git clone https://github.com/facebook/pfff.git --depth=1

# build pfff tools
cd <path_to_cloned_github_repository>
./configure -novisual
make depend
make

Now you just need to setup the configuration for sublime-phpcs package in sublime text.
- Preferences -> Package Settings -> PHP Code Sniffer -> Settings - User
- Add the following json configuration-

{
    "phpcs_php_path": "/usr/bin/php",
    "phpcs_executable_path": "/Users/<username>/.composer/vendor/bin/phpcs",
    "phpmd_executable_path": "/Users/<username>/.composer/vendor/bin/phpmd",
  "phpcbf_executable_path": "/Users/<username>/.composer/vendor/bin/phpcbf",
    "scheck_executable_path": "/Users/<username>/Documents/GitHub/pfff/scheck",
    "php_cs_fixer_executable_path": "/Users/<username>/.composer/vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer",

    "phpmd_run": true,
    "scheck_run": true,
    "phpcs_linter_run": true,
    "phpcs_sniffer_run": true,

    "extensions_to_blacklist": [],

    "phpcs_execute_on_save": false,
    "phpcs_show_errors_on_save": false,
    "phpcs_command_on_save": false,
    "php_cs_fixer_on_save": false,
    "phpcbf_on_save": false,
    "phpcs_linter_command_on_save": false,
    "phpmd_command_on_save": false,
    "scheck_command_on_save": false
}

In the above configuration, replace the paths with your install paths.

Also use either php_cs_fixer or phpcbf for fixing the errors. I’d recommend using phpcbf as that is already isntalled with phpcs and thus you won’t have to install php_cs_fixer at all.

I am disabling anything happening on save, but you can change the configuration any way you want. Find the defaults here-

Preferences -> Package Settings -> PHP Code Sniffer -> Settings - Default

Now you just need to do Cmd + Shift + P and look for sniff options.

References

sublime-phpcs - Github Pages
PHP Command Line Options - php.net
PHP CodeSniffer - Github
PHP Mess Detector - phpmd
PHP Coding Standards Fixer - Github
PHP Code Beautifier - Github
PHP installation - php.net
Introduction - Composer
Installing Git - git-scm
Scheck Wiki - Github
pfff Wiki - Github
pfff General Install Instructions - Github
pfff Linux Install Instructions - Github
pfff MacOSX Install Instructions - Github
sublime-phpcs example configurations - Github