In a new post to his site Woody Gilk showing how to use custom Composer hooks to run PHP style checks (using PHP_CodeSniffer) on your codebase and setting up the same configuration for all developers.

One of thing that has always bothered me about phpcs is that the lack of a local configuration file.

The official way to set the default standard for a project is [to set the standard on the command line]. This will write to a configuration file inside the vendor/ directory, which means that the configuration cannot be committed to version control. When a new team member is added they must also run this command or different style checks will be used.

Luckily, this can be solved with composer command events, namely the post-install-cmd and post-update-cmd events, which can be pointed to a PHP class that processes the event.

He includes the configuration changes showing how to set up the command in the Composer configuration to run post-install/update and the code required to set the phpcs standard to use. While this method works, he has also updated the post with an example of a single (XML) configuration file that accomplishes the same thing.