How to add visibility to 338 Class Constants in 25 seconds

2024-05-29

PHP 7.1 introduced 3 types of a class constant visibility: public, protected, and private. We want some constants, such as the client hostname, to be used only in the class, but others, like parameter names, to be used anywhere.

The class constant's visibility comes in handy to make your code as tight as possible and keep your design clean. These are the options we have:

class SomeConstants
{
    // can be used anywhere
    const PUBLIC_CONST_A = 1;
    public const PUBLIC_CONST_B = 2;

    // current, child or parent class can use
    protected const PROTECTED_CONST = 3;

    // local class only
    private const PRIVATE_CONST = 4;
}

While upgrading with legacy successful projects, I only come across projects with all constants public by default. It's either a lack of PHP 7.1 feature awareness or avoiding the pain of adding private and protected manually to every single constant. If it's 10 class constants to handle, it is easy. But going through 50+ constants or even 338 constants is pain.

Why is "Public by default" wrong

The downside of "public by default" is the unclear architecture, which allows constants to be used anywhere in the project. New developers who come to the project and don't know the architecture are most likely to use constants all over the project.

Imagine the same area of problems as with public methods. It's like injecting a controller to get access to the Doctrine repository of the User class:

$homepageController = $container->get(HomepageController::class);
$doctrine = $homepageController->get('doctrine');
$userRepository = $doctrine->getRepository(User::class);

Private or Protected?

The easy question is: how to decide if the constant is private or protected?

• The private constant is used solely by the class it's being defined in. Not anywhere else.
• The protected constant can be used by the class, the child, or the parent (not the best practice).

Once we have this straightforward algorithm to decide on, we only have to apply it to 338 constants in our project.

The hard question is: How can we automate this to apply it to any project with any number of constants?

Rule of Thumb: private by default

My approach is straightforward: battle-testing. I go to the project, make all constants private with PHPStorm Find & Replace, and see what goes wrong. In the production? No, I take the safe path instead. I run PHPStan and see reported errors like:

Access to private constant SOME_CONSTANT of class App\SomeClass.

↓

Then we know we must turn visibility to public:

 namespace App;

 class SomeClass
 {
-    private const SOME_CONSTANT;
+    public const SOME_CONSTANT;
 }

We also look for these errors:

Access to undefined constant App\SomeClass::ANOTER_CONSTANT

This doesn't mean constant does not exist. The constant is defined, but with wrong visibility. Let's fix it to protected:

↓

 namespace App;

 class SomeClass
 {
-    private const ANOTER_CONSTANT;
+    protected const ANOTER_CONSTANT;
 }

That's it!

Beware this False Positive

Well, there is one more case missed by PHPStan. That's using a particular keyword that allows parent classes to get their child values:

abstract class AbstractRepository
{
    private const TABLE_NAME = null;

    public function getRepository()
    {
        return $this->db->table(static::TABLE_NAME);
    }
}


final class TripRepository extends AbstractRepository
{
    private const TABLE_NAME = 'trips';
}

Why is this missed? Because the AbstractRepository calls its default constant value, so it's valid - just wrong. We also have to check all the static::<CONSTANT_NAME> overloaded by child classes.

25 Seconds to Apply

Now that we have the formula for success, we look for a way to apply it at scale:

• make all constants private by default
• run PHPStan and fix visibility to public and protected where needed
• check static::<CONSTANT_NAME> separately and make these protected
• commit, push, and create pull-request

How can we do this with automated tools?

• We can use PHP str_replace() to find & replace,
• then we can run PHPStan to get the report with errors,
• we can extract there errors and use str_replace() back to public or protected

So that's what we did.

New tool in Swiss knife

You can find a new command in the swiss-knife tool:

vendor/bin/swiss-knife privatize-constants src tests

It performs all the steps above in 25 seconds. Tested on a project with 338 public constants, including the static case, with 1-shot and no manual fixes needed. CI is passing and ready to merge.

Give it a try to tighten your class constants instantly.

Happy coding!

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