On the SitePoint PHP blog Matthew Setter introduces the use of git hooks to help with automatic static analysis of your application's code, integrating it directly into your current workflow. He shows how to use this library to make creating and installing them as easy as a single command (and they're written in PHP).

If you’ve been using Git for more than a short length of time, you’ll hopefully have heard of Git hooks. [...] There are hooks for pre- and post-commit, pre- and post-update, pre-push, pre-rebase, and so on. The sample hooks are written in Bash, one of the Linux shell languages. But they can be written in almost any language you’re comfortable or proficient with. [...] Thanks to Static Review, by Samuel Parkinson, you can now write Git hooks with native PHP, optionally building on the existing core classes. In today’s post, I’m going to give you a tour of what’s on offer, finishing up by writing a custom class to check for any lingering calls to var_dump().

He walks you through the installation of the library and helps you create a simple working example that ensures you've correctly set up your (Composer) dependencies. He explains a bit about what's involved in the StaticReview package and the three "introspection" objects initialized for each run. He ends the post by walking you through the creation of a custom, more real-world check that evaluates your code (via a simple grep) to ensure no var_dump statements were left in.