The SitePoint PHP blog has a recent tutorial showing how to use PhpMetrics to visualize your application and the quality of its code.

We had been looking into code quality checking tools for a while here on SitePoint – most recently in a series on Jenkins, but none of those could do what a project I’ve only recently found out about can. PhpMetrics uses D3 and some sophisticated analysis algorithms to scan your application’s code and output intricate reports about it.

He walks you through the install (via Composer) and how to clone two example projects, Laravel and Symfony, to evaluate. He includes the command line to run the evaluation and plenty of screenshots showing the results for things like:

• Cyclomatic complexity
• Abstractness
• Maintainability
• Code density

He uses the results from these two projects in his examples and, at the end of the post, summarizes and compares the results it produced.