In this post to his site Matt Stauffer shares several methods you can use to count the total number of lines of code in a PHP project.

I'm giving a talk soon about Laravel and "the enterprise", and the concept of LOC (lines of code) keeps coming up. It turns out that's actually a much harder number to discover than you might think, so I figured I would write up a few options here.

For what it's worth, I'm not a big fan of LOC as a measure of any importance, but it can at least give us some broad foundations to use to talk about broad differences in project size. If you were to ask me, I would say we shouldn't even think about it. But we don't always have that luxury.

He starts with a tl;dr for those that want the quick win (use PHPLOC) but shares other options with different tools too:

• https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc - a smarter version of PHPLOC that accounts for empty lines, comments, etc
• the Statistic plugin for PHPStorm
• a regular expression match for use in Sublime Text
• manually from the command line using find
• using the Silver Searcher tool

He shares answers to a few FAQs about finding lines of code and the output of each tool/command on the same project to show the differences.

On the Laravel News site there's an article posted showing you how to determine the complexity of your application using the phploc tool from Sebastian Bergmann.

Yesterday, Taylor made a post comparing the code complexity between Laravel and other frameworks. The tool he used to generate these reports is called phploc and it’s very easy to run on your own code base.

I decided as a means of comparison I would run that on the codebase for this site and just see what the results are.

The tutorial walks you through the installation of the tool (as a globally installed Composer package), how to execute it and what the results look like. These results include a lot of data including:

• Average Class Length
• Average Complexity per LLOC
• (Use of) Global Constants
• (Number of) Namespaces

phploc is useful for getting the overall numbers but he wanted something a bit more specific. For that he chose the PhpMetrics package that allows for deeper introspection into files and classes in your code to locate the complexity and find spots for refactoring.

Ruslan Yakushev has a recent post about installing the PEAR tools and installing an example package, phploc.

PEAR (short for PHP Extension and Application Repository) is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. In includes many useful tools and components that can be easily downloaded and installed by using PEAR package manager. This post describes how to install and configure PEAR package manager and then how to use it to install a PEAR package. An example PEAR package used in this post is phploc, which is a tool for measuring the size of PHP projects.

He recommends installing PHP via the Web Platform Installer and use the PHP 5.3 VC9 non-thread-safe package with the PHP Manager. All of the commands needed are included as well as some of the sample output that results. Once you get PEAR installed, then they show how to discover the PEAR channel and "pear install" the right packages for phploc (including the dependencies it might need).

On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new article from Lorna Mitchell looking at the phploc tool as a way to analyze your code and pick out a whole selection of statistics.

This has been a feature of PHPUnit for some time but has been released as a separate project in the phpunit pear channel. The nature of PHPUnit means that many of these statistics can be collected while the tests are running, which is why it was added to that tool in the first instance.

Stats gathered include the number of directories, files, interfaces, methods, functions and constants with more details for each (like visibility, actual lines of code contained in them and the cyclomatic complexity). The tool is very simple to use - just call it from the command like and give it a path to your codebase. It does the rest and spits out a text-based report.

In wanting to both keep his development streamlined and add in a new tool (phploc), Raphael Stolt has come up with a way to integrate phploc into a Phing buildfile and have it run as an automated task.

Exactly one month ago Sebastian Bergmann, of PHPUnit fame, started to implement a similar tool dubbed phploc which can give you an overview of the size for any given PHP project. As I wanted to automate the invocation of this handy tool and collect it's report output out of a Phing buildfile, I invested some time to develop a custom Phing task doing so.

He includes instructions on installing phploc, creating the last in Phing (complete with code) and integrating it into your Phing build.