PHP 8 is just around the corner! And it’s massive. PHPStan is ready to analyse your codebases that will be taking advantage of the latest features in the coming weeks and months.

I’m really excited to show everyone what I’ve been working on for the past 9 months. It’s a new product aimed to enhance user experience when using PHPStan.

In December 2015, a year before the first version of PHPStan saw the light of day, I released the Slevomat Coding Standard, a set of rules for PHP_CodeSniffer.

Some PHPStan releases bring new checks, some of them improve performance, and others consist mostly of bugfixes. But the latest release is about making lives of PHPStan’s users much easier.

PHPStan’s documentation had been an underinvested area for a long time. Users had to scout through release notes and Git commits to learn about the latest features, and to be able to use PHPStan to the fullest. There was a README on GitHub I wrote back in 2016 when PHPStan was first released, and it didn’t change much since then. In contrast with PHPStan itself which after dozens of releases over three and a half years is a much more capable and helpful tool. Today, I’m settling all family business.

Strongly-typed object-oriented code helps me tremendously during refactoring. When I realize I need to pass more information from one place to another, I usually take my first step by changing a return typehint, or adding a required parameter to a method.