Integrate phpstan into Bitbucket pipeline

With this short article we would like to give you some helpful tips in the area of web development. If you have any further questions or need more information about custom & responsive web development, feel free to contact us. We are here to help you with all your challenges and now our tip regarding PHP code analyzer:

A static code analyzer helps to detect many issues before they kill 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 first need to configure phpstan itself for your PHP application. We assume that you are using composer, so you can easily 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 this, for example:

parameters:
excludes_analysis:
- *vendor/*

You can now test if your code is clean by running the following command from your root directory (assuming your vendor folder is there).

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

Let's have a quick look at the parameters:

-l 0

-c .\phpstan.neon

.

--memory-limit=1G

As your codebase gets bigger you may need to allocate more memory to phpstan, you can do that via this flag.

If all that works, we can move on to the bitbucket pipeline:

To do this, 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 will cache 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 need this php extension too,
// otherwise phpstan won't find the MySQL constants etc.
- curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
                                            // Composer itself has to be installed, too, of course.
- 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 crucial 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 break the pipeline.

The person who did the bad push will even get a mail and get to fix his errors quickly before anyone notices.

You can test the whole thing by pushing syntactically wrong code on the branch you configured the pipeline for and going to the pipelines overview in Bitbucket.

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