Introducing ECS Prefixed and Downgraded to PHP 7.1

ECS is part of Symplify that requires PHP 7.3 version as minimal. That cuts down options for you as an end-user. And that's not the only problem. Do you require Symfony 2.8 or 3.4? You're blocked.

How can we improve your experience while keeping the latest features?

When we try to install ECS with miss conflicting dependency...

composer require symfony/console:2.8
composer require symplify/easy-coding-standard --dev

❌

...we'll end up with composer "ECS requires at least symfony 4.4 version, cannot install" error.

Some of you might know there is a way around with ECS Prefixed version. This package is built on every ECS release into special standalone repository. It has own dependency namespace prefixed so that you can install it with the same package of another version, like symfony/console:

composer require symfony/console:2.8
composer require symplify/easy-coding-standard-prefixed --dev

✅

Imagine you have keys from your car. They work like regular keys most of the week, but on weekends not. Unless, of course, you drop them 2x times before putting the key inside the lock.

Requiring a suffix to remember is not very intuitive and creates an awful developer experience. So how can we improve this developer experience?

Prefix on Release

How would you expect ECS to install?

composer require symfony/console:2.8
composer require symplify/easy-coding-standard --dev

✅

Me too. So how can we do that? First, we need to understand the current project architecture.


Symplify is a like Symfony, Laravel or luminas a monorepo.

What does monorepo mean? That:


Now we need to merge the last 2 steps into 1.

If the process were a git diff, it would look like this:

 - PR is merged to symplify/symplify ↓
-- then symplify/easy-coding-standard is split ↓
-- then build of symplify/easy-coding-standard-prefixed is published
+- then build of symplify/easy-coding-standard is published on split

Thanks to monorepo, this is a piece of cake. We need to take the prefixing script and move it before the split itself:

Now instead of splitting the original code, we split already prefixed code.

Downgraded by Default

Do you know middlewares? They're like a layer of you lasagne that you can insert anywhere between request and response. Do you need to add an extra security layer? Just add security middleware.

Layer in CI can be stacked on each other in similar way. If we can handle scoping, why not add downgrading too?


Before we had:

Now we have:

✅

How to Upgrade?

The ECS with PHP 7.1 and scoped code is available since version 9.3.10. You can run bare composer update or specify the exact version to be sure:

composer remove squizlabs/php_codesniffer
composer remove friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer
composer update symplify/easy-coding-standard:^9.3.10

Do you use symplify/easy-coding-standard-prefixed? Replace it with a new package:

composer remove squizlabs/php_codesniffer
composer remove friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer
composer remove symplify/easy-coding-standard-prefixed
composer require symplify/easy-coding-standard:^9.3.10 --dev

What has Changed?

There might be a BC break because we're scoping ECS dependencies from now on. That means php-cs-fixer 3.0+ and PHP_CodeSniffer 3.6+ code is now accessible only for vendor/bin/ecs run.

Do you write your Fixer or Sniffs? Add required packages: require

composer require friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer --dev
composer require squizlabs/php_codesniffer --dev

Apart from that, everything should be running correctly. If not, let us know in GitHub issues.


Happy coding!



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