Get Quick Error Count for each PHPStan level

2024-05-10

When I come to a new project, I want to make a rough idea of what I'm dealing with in a few minutes. I usually check composer.json and measure the lines.

Then, I'd love to run PHPStan and get a rough idea of the current state. But are there baselines, custom extensions, global ignores, or no PHPStan at all?

Fast Project Feedback

PHPStan is a great tool to check your code for static errors. It's also a great way to visualize where we are today and how much work it would take to reach the next level. The problem is that it can only analyze one level at a time—usually, the one defined in the phpstan.neon file.

Also, even if we switch the level easily with the --level CLI option, we might get a false positive result: 0 errors.

Why false positive? That's because 400 errors are ignored in either baselines or in phpstan.neon itself. We'd have to go through this, create a bare phpstan.neon and run PHPStan again.

However, there are also extensions that add their own errors. When we run the same PHPStan on the same code, we'll get different results based on enabled extensions.

Standardized Results

What I need are standardized results so we can:

compare status of multiple projects,
and also report progress in time - so the business can see we're making progress by lowering the error count

We need a bare phpstan.neon that runs, records error count, and then runs again with the next level, from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, etc. Creating phpstan.neon per project and running PHPStan multiple times is not my favorite activity, so I thought about automating it.

PHPStan Bodyscan

I needed a package you can install anywhere on PHP 7.2+:

composer require tomasvotruba/phpstan-bodyscan --dev

Then you can run it locally in the current project:

vendor/bin/phpstan-bodyscan

Or on the project in a different directory:

vendor/bin/phpstan-bodyscan run ../favorite-project

And then, it would be great to see a simple result table:

+-------+-------------+
| Level | Error count |
+-------+-------------+
|     0 |           0 |
|     1 |          35 |
|     2 |          59 |
|     3 |          93 |
|     4 |         120 |
|     5 |         125 |
|     6 |         253 |
|     7 |         350 |
|     8 |         359 |
+-------+-------------+

That I could copy-paste to GPT and get a simple chart:

So, I made the package and used it for the first project.

Here it is - phpstan-bodyscan.

Happy coding!

Do you learn from my contents or use open-source packages like Rector every day?
Consider supporting it on GitHub Sponsors. I'd really appreciate it!