On the IBuildings techPortal site today there's a new article from Lorna Mitchell about the use of the PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR package to run formatting checks on your code.

PHP Code Sniffer (PHPCS) is a package for syntax checking, available from PEAR. It can check code against defined rules covering anything from whitespace through doc comments to variable naming conventions and beyond. In this article we'll look at getting started with PHPCS, using it to syntax check our files, and go further to look at how the rules are create and the standards defined.

She goes through the installation (a simple call with the pear installer) and a few examples of code and the matching output for a few of the syntax formats included with the tool. She also has a section on the structure of some of the rules and looks at the sniff for defining functions for the PEAR standard.

Benjamin Eberlei has posted about some work he's done on a plugin for the NetBeans IDE to integrate support for the PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR package's abilities.

Previously the plugin used an unnecessary API which restricted the use to Netbeans 6.7.0 only. This API was removed so that the plugin should now work with all Netbeans Versions >= 6.7.0. Additionally when working the previous version would scan every PHP script on a file per file basis when the all projects or main projects filters were activated.

You can find this latest update to the plugin on his github repository. You can find out more about the PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR package on its PEAR page.

On his code-diesel blog Sameer has posted a tutorial that introduces you to the PHP_CodeSniffer library and some simple examples of it in action.

A coding standard basically tells developers in what style they must write their code. If programmers work in a team than a coding standard ensures that each will be able to read the others code without any effort. [...] A tool which scans your source code and checks it against a standard would be quite a help. PHP_CodeSniffer is one such tool.

The PHP_CodeSniffer package allows you to check code (to "sniff" it) and ensure that it matches against a certain format. The tool doesn't do any testing outside of that, though - no unit testing or functionality checking.

Sameer includes a guide to getting the tool installed and using it to get the source files in a certain directory. He also points to a tutorial for developing your own coding standards.

Sebastian Bergmann has a new post that lists a few quality assurance testing tools you can use to ensure that you and your code are safe to make the jump to production.

He's laid out a map of the tools that can all interact to create a more robust environment for automatically building and testing your code. Here's his list:

• PHP_CodeSniffer
• phpmd
• phpcpd
• PHP_Depend
• PHPUnit

The results of all of these tools running on your code is then fed into the CruiseControl instance and passed off to phpUnderControl for final deployment.

Over on the Blue Parabola blog Matthew Turland recently posted a new tutorial on using the PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR package to check out how well your code adheres to the coding standard of your choice.

For the sake of consistency [on a client project], the development team had stuff with the coding standard used by the framework itself. However, evaluating the code manually is tedious and time-consuming. There's a solution to this type of problem: the PHP_CodeSniffer package from PEAR, which builds an infrastructure around tokenizers for PHP, CSS, and JavaScript and utilities to detect coding standard violations within code in any of those languages.

He includes an example token output (the codesniffer package is based on the Tokenizer) from a script and walks you through the initial setup of the package, how to create "sniffs" for the code you want to analyze and how to run them using the popular unit testing tool PHPUnit.

On the SaniSoft blog Tarique Sani has posted about (and made available for download) some code sniffs for the CakePHP framework. Some problems arose with some of the naming that the framework uses, but with some "tinkering around"...

[It became] apparent that I had to have my own set of Cake sniffs to manage this but a separate standard just for this seemed an over kill and the simplicity of code made it kind of fun to add more standards which I liked but were in different set of sniffs.

You can grab the whole list of sniffs from their downloads. They implemented them as a pre-commit hook on their SVN server even so that developers could not violate the coding standards when they submit their code.

Stefan Priebsch recently posted about his struggles with creating a custom coding started with the PHP_CodeSniffer package:

In CodeSniffer, a coding standard is basically represented by an empty class that extends PHP_CodeSniffer_Standards_CodingStandard. I could not get the CodeSniffer to find my coding standard, though, and found the documentation lacking about where to put it, how to name it, and how to refer to it in the --standard switch.

After an email to Greg Sherwood (developer of the package) Stefan figured out his issue and has shared the solution in this post (step by step).

Daniel O'Connor has posted a quick guide to customizing your installation of the PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR package to match the coding standard you'd like.

PHP_CodeSniffer is a PEAR package which detects potential coding problems and enforces your style guide. The default is the PEAR coding standard, but you can easily change that.

His method requires the creation of a custom "FooCodingStandard.php" (named whatever you'd like, of course) that contains a class/method defining the "sniffs" you'd like to use for your standard. Use "pfm" to make it into a package and install it to your system - you'll be all set.