Software development is writing code. Testing makes sure the code actually works, so in a nutshell: Testing is software development :-)
Phan is a static analyzer for PHP. [https://github.com/phan/phan Phan project on GitHub] It will help you write better PHP7 PHP code. You'll need the [https://github.com/nikic/php-ast Abstract Syntax Tree] generated by PHPextension. You can read a [https://github.com/phan/phan/wiki/Tutorial-for-Analyzing-a-Large-Sloppy-Code-Base tutorial for how to get Phan working in your project]
The MediaWiki project uses Phan. See the article [[mw:Continuous_integration/Phan|Continuous_integration/Phan]]
#https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_extensions#File_structure
#https://github.com/nikic/php-ast
#https://github.com/phan/phan/wiki/Getting-Started
#https://github.com/phan/phan/blob/v5/internal/CLI-HELP.md
The on-wiki documentation and even the upstream projects do not exactly provide a usable guide for '''MediaWiki extension''' developers to actually use Phan. If you download MediaWiki and composer update (to get dev dependencies) and also install PHP-AST, then you should be able to run composer phan or ./vendor/bin/phan -p . But, that analyzes the entire MediaWiki codebase, and does '''not''' analyze your extension (unless you specifically add a proper .phan/config.php file to your extension).
[[Mark Hershberger]] provides a good an example of what that might look like in his CommentStreams configuration<syntaxhighlight lang="php">
<?php
$cfg = require __DIR__ . '/../vendor/mediawiki/mediawiki-phan-config/src/config.php';
$cfg['suppress_issue_types'][] = 'PhanUndeclaredConstant';
return $cfg;
</syntaxhighlight>the The more traditional form of that<ref>https://codesearch.wmcloud.org/things/?q=exclude_analysis_directory_list&files=.phan%2Fconfig.php&excludeFiles=&repos=</ref> is<syntaxhighlight lang="php">
$cfg = require __DIR__ . '/../vendor/mediawiki/mediawiki-phan-config/src/config.php';
return $cfg;
</syntaxhighlight>But why is the normal pattern to include directories and exclude those same directories? The answer ''seems'' to be that you include 'dependencies' for class definition, but do not warn about issues outside the limits of your own extension.
The bigger (unanswered) question is what does mediawiki-phan-config do? What is the compiled and complete configuration that you are "running" against your codebase? == Plugins ==Phan ha a ton of plugins - but they don't seem to be used in the MediaWiki configuration. Or are they? It's not obvious to me yet. https://github.com/phan/phan/tree/v5/.phan/plugins#2-general-use-plugins The [https://github.com/phan/phan/wiki/Writing-Plugins-for-Phan writing plugins guide] also describes how they work. == Check code for compatibility with a particular PHP version ==One major reason I wanted to use phan was to upgrade a whole codebase, and check its compatibility with an upgraded PHP (moving from 7.4 to 8.1). There is at least one caveat to doing this: You should be running php 8.1 in order to check code for compatibility with 8.1 You can use phan with the config setting of <code>target_php_version</code><ref>https://github.com/phan/phan/wiki/Phan-Config-Settings#analysis-of-a-php-version</ref> == Phan with VSCode ==https://github.com/phan/phan/wiki/Editor-Support supposed to just work (with the plugin). But after I installed the plugin, it was not producing any hint of working or any errors. == Phan checks ==There are over 1,000 things that phan tests its own code against https://github.com/phan/phan/tree/v5/tests https://github.com/phan/phan/tree/v5/tests/files/src<br /> == Other Static Analysis tools for PHP == ===PHPStan===
https://phpstan.org/
===Psalm===
https://psalm.dev/
[[Category:Tools]]
[[Category:Continuous Integration]]
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