nicksdot/phpstan-prettier-output

Custom PHPStan formatters for a prettier output.

0.3.0 2024-11-12 06:26 UTC

This package is auto-updated.

Last update: 2025-07-12 07:53:46 UTC


README

Important

This is a proof of concept. Things are rough, hacky and not cleaned up. However, it works.

Installation

$ composer require --dev nicksdot/phpstan-prettier-output

Setup Formatters

services:
+	errorFormatter.customTable:
+		class: NickSdot\PrettierStanOutput\CustomTableFormatter
+	errorFormatter.customJson:
+		class: NickSdot\PrettierStanOutput\CustomJsonFormatter
+	errorFormatter.customCheckstyle:
+		class: NickSdot\PrettierStanOutput\CustomCheckstyleFormatter

IDE Output

If you also want prettier messages in your IDE you must override the default CheckstyleErrorFormatter. To do this, override the service in your phpstan.non.

services:
	errorFormatter.customTable:
		class: NickSdot\PrettierStanOutput\CustomTableFormatter
	errorFormatter.customJson:
		class: NickSdot\PrettierStanOutput\CustomJsonFormatter
	errorFormatter.customCheckstyle:
		class: NickSdot\PrettierStanOutput\CustomCheckstyleFormatter
+	errorFormatter.checkstyle:
+		class: NickSdot\PrettierStanOutput\CustomCheckstyleFormatter

Wishlist

To make this package less hacky, we would need the following.

PHPStorm PHPStan Plugin

  • allow custom formatter in settings
  • allow line breaks in tooltip output.
  • adjust processing and consumption of PhpStanMessageProcessor.java so that inspection tooltips and inspection the inspections message window use different messages. Similar to how it already works in the HTML inspection.

Plugin repo: https://github.com/JetBrains/phpstorm-phpstan-plugin

PHPStan

Currently, we rely on Regex to re-format the reported messages (e.g. adding line-breaks). It would be nice, but it is no deal-breaker if not, if PHPStan would add support for formatted messages.

Possible approaches:

  • keep track of all non sprintf'ed messages in a static property (?) of RuleErrorBuilder::message().
  • make it a first class feature to have a formatted and unformatted variant of messages.
  • add values required to build messages to PHPStan\Command\AnalysisResult.

Considerations

Usage of "Tips"

Ondrej recommended the sole usage of "tips" output. However, this seems not sufficient for the following reasons.

  • More often than not there are no "tips".
  • There can be multiple tips per error.
  • They are often simply external references like in the following example.
12   app/Models/Option.php:12                                                      
PHPDoc type array of property App\Models\Option::$fillable is not the same as PHPDoc type list<string> of overridden property Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model::$fillable.                                                                                 

💡 You can fix 3rd party PHPDoc types with stub files:               
💡 https://phpstan.org/user-guide/stub-files    

Given this example, the solution proposed by Ondrej would result in the following which is not much more readable and has the same cognitive load than before.

Using the approach from this repository, the output will result in.

12   app/Models/Option.php:12 
PHPDoc type of property App\Models\Option::$fillable is not the same as PHPDoc type of overridden property Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model::$fillable. 

⁉️ array
⁉️ list<string>

💡 You can fix 3rd party PHPDoc types with stub files:               
💡 https://phpstan.org/user-guide/stub-files    

So the current conclusion is, tips are not the way.

Credits

All formatters are based on the PHPStan built-in ErrorFormatters.

Contributing

License

MIT