2 min read

Find the One PHPStan Rule You Need, Beyond the Core

This post was updated in October 2026 with fresh know-how.
What is new?

The PHPStan Rules Beyond Core page has been removed, so this post is kept for the idea only - the links to it no longer work.

PHPStan core gets you to level 10 with solid type checks. But some gems, the rules that catch your anti-patterns, live scattered across a dozen community packages most people never hear about.

I got tired of hunting through GitHub READMEs to find "is there a rule for this?", so I built a single searchable page that indexes 11 custom PHPStan rules packages.

You spot the same code smell in pull request after pull request - a static method here, a forbidden dd() in production there - and you think:

"Surely someone already wrote a PHPStan rule for this?"

They probably did. The problem is finding it.

We had the same problem with Rector rules - so many that people kept re-implementing ones that already existed. I built the "Find rule" page to fix it.


These project-specific rules live in community packages: symplify/phpstan-rules, shipmonk/phpstan-rules, ergebnis/phpstan-rules, spaze/phpstan-disallowed-calls, and a long tail of smaller ones.

Each ships its own README and naming, often with just a generic package description. To answer "is there a rule for X?", you'd open a dozen tabs - nobody does that. So great rules sit unused, only their authors know about them, and we keep eyeballing the same problems by hand in code review.

One page, Every rule

So I made a single page that indexes them all: PHPStan Rules Beyond Core


A searchable index of 260+ rules from 11 popular community packages. Each entry shows:

  • the rule class you drop into phpstan.neon
  • a plain-English description of what it does
  • the message it reports when it fires
  • and - where documented - a wrong/correct code example side by side

Search the way you think

Discovery is the point, so type what's on your mind - no exact class name needed:

  • search "forbidCast" and casting rules rank first
  • mistype "noreturn" as one word and it still finds "No" + "return"

...or "final abstract" - it marks all non-abstract methods of abstract classes as final. Surprisingly useful; fixed 2 cases on my own site.


From "I wish" to installed in one click

Found one? Each package block has a ready-to-copy install line:

composer require --dev symplify/phpstan-rules

Then register the rule in your phpstan.neon:

rules:
    - Ergebnis\PHPStan\Rules\Methods\FinalInAbstractClassRule

...and run PHPStan:

vendor/bin/phpstan

Keep this one or explore the full package. That's how PHPStan rules should work - solve one specific issue and catch it in CI before we even tell our agent.


Missing a package? Open an issue or send a PR (this site is 100 % open source) - I'd love to improve the index.


Happy coding!