PHP Quality Assurance

What is the internet for?

2018-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Recently I noticed a change on the old PHP QA Tools domain "phpqatools.org".

Where before was a simple page for PHP QA tools, now it is telling you to use virtual reality… for porn. So I took down all the links to the old page. And if you still have a link to it, you might want to update it to https://phpqa.io. But then again, that's totally up to you!

After all, I guess that Avenue Q song was right all along.

About Composer and PHARs

2017-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

All projects have an installation section now.

For now, however, only the official instructions are visible, as close as possible as they are mentioned on all the websites, repositories, wikis and readme files, and only in the three most common ways: using Composer, git and/or PHARs. There are more obscure ways mentioned now and then, and they will be added soon, for completeness sake, but after today, I certainly am hoping at least one of the PHAR tools will make it through.

Cause yes, as Stephan Hochdörfer mentioned, we do have a problem.

I certainly would love to add more secure instructions on how to download PHARs and packages in a verifiable way.

Let the era of a lovechild between Composer and PHIVE begin!

Sincerely, your buzzard.

Welcome

2017-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Welcome to the new PHP Quality Assurance website.

A few weeks ago I noticed that the PHP QA Tools website, curated by Sebastian Bergmann, closed down somewhere late 2016. However simple the setup of the onepager was, I felt like I lost something. For years, it was one of those pages I kept mentioning to new and upcoming PHP developers. Every time I saw people writing PHP code that could use a little magic touch, there were two pages I mentioned: PHP The Right Way, and the QA Tools page.

But now the distinct tiles were replaced by a sec white page with a formal RIP notice, forwarding any lost souls to an extensive and mostly up-to-date list in a public Exakat repository. I had encountered that list before, but however extensive and well maintained, nobody had ever noticed that a few tools were even present multiple times. It is a long list, and there are many awesome tools to be found in it, but I was wondering if any new developer I would send there would even try to digg until they would reach the good stuff.

Meanwhile, in the last few months, I had been looking into Quality Assurance tools for the projects my colleagues and I are working on. And it was a very welcome surprise to see how many good tools are out there. As I had been using Docker for development for quite some time, it was clear to me to start using very basic alpine images to test-run many of those tools against our codebases. It was a success. When our team started moving our projects to GitLab and it's pipelines, the images could be plugged in very easily, and since then code reports would be available for every single commit. Even Scrutinizer, however awesome, could not keep up with the insights we got from all those amazing tools that were readily available for anyone who wanted to use them.

So last week, I moved 20something Dockerfiles to a phpqa organisation on DockerCloud. Those are images for several PHP related Quality Assurance tools, ready to use. But they need documentation. Desparately. (Not in the least because using DockerCloud will not provide any details to DockerHub.) Since we gave a Jekyll and GitHub Pages workshop for students with PHP Leuven recently, it was time to try it myself. After adding some Cloudflare magic and HTTPS sprinkles, and with a bit of dry and dusty Javascript twists, here it is. For now, there's not even any images documentation to be found on it. But there is a slowly growing list of tools that you can search for and filter on, and there are lots of plans for a lot more simple functionality.

At least now, I have a new webpage to send those PHP code quality haters to. I hope you will too.

Sincerely, your buzzard.

Quality Assurance in PHP projects

2010-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

Quoting from the original website:

The PHP Quality Assurance Toolchain

Sebastian Bergmann's presentation on "The State of QA Tools for PHP" at the FrOSCon 2009 conference raised demand for an overview page of PHP quality assurance tools.

This page is a first attempt of creating such an overview.