Integrate phpstan into Bitbucket Pipeline

A static code analyzer helps to detect many issues before they take down your application.

We use phpstan for our PHP projects and manage to integrate it into the pipeline so that a push is only deployed if the analysis is successful.

For this to work, you must first configure phpstan itself for your PHP application. We assume that you are using composer, so you can simply add it as a dev-dependency:

composer require --dev phpstan/phpstan

Then you have to create a config to at least exclude the vendor files. To do this, create a phpstan.neon in your root directory and fill it with e.g. this:

parameters:
excludes_analysis:
- *vendor/*

You can now test whether your code is clean by calling the following command from your root directory (assuming your vendor folder is also located there).

vendor/bin/phpstan analyze -l 0 -c .\phpstan.neon . --memory-limit=1G

Briefly about the individual parameters:

-l 0

-c .\phpstan.neon

.

--memory-limit=1G

If your codebase gets bigger you may need to give phpstan more memory, you can do this with this flag.

If all this works, we can start with the bitbucket pipeline:

Simply create a bitbucket-pipelines.yml file in your root folder and fill it with the following content:

image: php:7.2-cli

pipelines:
branches:
dev: // On which branch should the pipeline run?
- step: // The first step is to call phpstan
name: Run PHP analyzer        
caches: // This is a standard Bitbucket cache that caches your composer modules
- composer // You don't have to reload them every time you run the pipeline
script:
- apt-get update -yqq
- apt-get install -y wget git zip unzip // We need git and unzip for the composer installs
- docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql // If you use MySQL you probably also need this php extension,
// otherwise phpstan will not find the MySQL constants etc.
- curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
                                            // Composer itself must of course also be installed.
- cd ./application/ // Depending on the framework ... in our case ZF3
- composer install // Install dependencies once 
- vendor/bin/phpstan analyze -l 0 -c phpstan.neon . --memory-limit=1G
// Last but not least, the decisive call
- step:
... // This is where your deployment to the DEV / TEST / whatever environment would come in

So if phpstan has something to complain about, it will return a non-zero exit code and Bitbucket will abort the pipeline.

The person who made the bad push even gets an email and can quickly fix his mistakes before anyone notices.

You can test the whole thing by simply pushing syntactically incorrect code to the branch for which you have configured the pipeline and going to the pipelines overview in Bitbucket.

From there you can access the individual pipeline jobs and see the log by clicking on an individual job.

Do you need further help with web development for your company? Our web developers will be happy to assist you and answer your questions - feel free to contact us!