PHPUnit training at Squiz

Sebastian Bergmann was in Sydney last week and I took the opportunity to have him come in and do a day of PHPUnit training for the developers at Squiz. We also went through continuous integration software like phpUnderControl and Bamboo.

It was great to finally meet Sebastian and learn a lot about the tools we will be using in MySource4 to ensure the quality of our product.

If you are thinking of some in-house PHP training, Sebastian is great tutor on all things testing and comes pre-loaded with some funny and informative stories about his travels and PHP development in general.

PHP_CodeSniffer reporting improvements

Spurred on by some feature requests and at least one annoying colleague (you know who you are), I've made some fairly good improvements to the way PHP_CodeSniffer reports the errors and warnings it finds. I've added support for the concept of error sources, allowing you to see which sniff generated an error and also filter out the messages for that sniff.

The XML, CSV and CheckStyle report formats all now include a source attribute in their output. This will allow continuous integration platforms to call PHP_CodeSniffer and produce a report of the most common errors rather than just display a list of all errors or the number of errors for each file.

You can also expose this information in the full and summary reports, although it is off by default to avoid clutter. Use the new command line argument -s to show sources in these reports. Instead of something like this:

FILE: /home/squiz/PHP_CodeSniffer/temp.php
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 6 ERROR(S) AND 0 WARNING(S) AFFECTING 5 LINE(S)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 2 | ERROR | Missing file doc comment
 3 | ERROR | Object operator not indented correctly; expected 4 spaces but
   |       | found 0
 3 | ERROR | Object operator must be at the start of the line, not the end
 4 | ERROR | TRUE, FALSE and NULL must be lowercase; expected "true" but found
   |       | "TRUE"
 6 | ERROR | Object operator not indented correctly; expected 4 spaces but
   |       | found 1
 9 | ERROR | TRUE, FALSE and NULL must be lowercase; expected "false" but found
   |       | "FALSE"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You get this:

FILE: /home/squiz/PHP_CodeSniffer/temp.php
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 6 ERROR(S) AND 0 WARNING(S) AFFECTING 5 LINE(S)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 2 | ERROR | Missing file doc comment (PEAR.Commenting.FileComment)
 3 | ERROR | Object operator not indented correctly; expected 4 spaces but
   |       | found 0 (PEAR.WhiteSpace.ObjectOperatorIndent)
 3 | ERROR | Object operator must be at the start of the line, not the end
   |       | (PEAR.WhiteSpace.ObjectOperatorIndent)
 4 | ERROR | TRUE, FALSE and NULL must be lowercase; expected "true" but found
   |       | "TRUE" (Generic.PHP.LowerCaseConstant)
 6 | ERROR | Object operator not indented correctly; expected 4 spaces but
   |       | found 1 (PEAR.WhiteSpace.ObjectOperatorIndent)
 9 | ERROR | TRUE, FALSE and NULL must be lowercase; expected "false" but found
   |       | "FALSE" (Generic.PHP.LowerCaseConstant)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is also a totally new report format that shows a summary of your error sources. You use the command line argument --report=source to print a report like this:

PHP CODE SNIFFER VIOLATION SOURCE SUMMARY
------------------------------------------------------------
STANDARD   CATEGORY      SNIFF                         COUNT
------------------------------------------------------------
PEAR       White space   Object operator indent        3
Generic    PHP           Lower case constant           2
PEAR       Commenting    File comment                  1
------------------------------------------------------------
A TOTAL OF 6 SNIFF VIOLATION(S) WERE FOUND IN 3 SOURCE(S)
------------------------------------------------------------

You can also get it to use official source names using the -s command line argument:

PHP CODE SNIFFER VIOLATION SOURCE SUMMARY
------------------------------------------------------------
SOURCE                                                 COUNT
------------------------------------------------------------
PEAR.WhiteSpace.ObjectOperatorIndent                   3
Generic.PHP.LowerCaseConstant                          2
PEAR.Commenting.FileComment                            1
------------------------------------------------------------
A TOTAL OF 6 SNIFF VIOLATION(S) WERE FOUND IN 3 SOURCE(S)
------------------------------------------------------------

The idea with these source IDs is that you can then use them to filter your (potentially) long list of error messages and target a particular rule that you want to fix all in one go. So in this report, we have 3 errors generated from PEAR.WhiteSpace.ObjectOperatorIndent. To find out what they are, add the command line argument --sniffs=PEAR.WhiteSpace.ObjectOperatorIndent to get this:

FILE: /home/squiz/PHP_CodeSniffer/temp.php
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 3 ERROR(S) AND 0 WARNING(S) AFFECTING 2 LINE(S)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 3 | ERROR | Object operator not indented correctly; expected 4 spaces but
   |       | found 0
 3 | ERROR | Object operator must be at the start of the line, not the end
 6 | ERROR | Object operator not indented correctly; expected 4 spaces but
   |       | found 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another related feature that was added is the ability to write the report output to a file in addition to writing it to the screen. This solves the problem where PHP_CodeSniffer comes across some code it cannot parse and throws PHP notices before XML output, creating invalid XML. Writing to a file is easy; just use the --report-file=filename command line argument.

All these features are currently in CVS and will be released in 1.2.0a1 very soon.