On thePHP.cc blog today there's a new post sharing some helpful hints related to refactoring your application to PHP 7 written up by a friend of the group, Tim Bezhashvyly.

Recently I have migrated a relatively large codebase from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7 and would like to share some of my learnings. To get the most out of this article, you should be familiar with scalar type declarations (and return type declarations). To learn about these and other features of PHP 7, I recommend the "PHP 7 Explained" eBook.

He makes the recommendation of a bold first step: enabling the strict typing on every file in your application to enforce the typing of all values. Next he recommends running your current test suite to see where the failures are. Changes are pretty high that you'll find issues with type switching and magic method handling. He suggests a method for migrating your code effectively to PHP 7: a test-driven migration. This focus works fine if your coverage is good but unless you're exercising all parts of your codebase things will unfortunately be missed.

He also points out some other changes you can make with this update including the removal of some PHPDoc annotations (you'll know the type for sure now) and modifications that may need to be made to current mock objects in your tests. There's a few other smaller things he recommends looking out for as well including the use of the "silencer" operator and exception changes.