pondeplu/acorn-ide-helper

IDE autocompletion for Roots Acorn projects — runs barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper inside WordPress with configuration tuned for Acorn and VS Code / Intelephense.

v0.1.0 2026-08-20 19:47 UTC

Requires

• php: >=8.3
• barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper: ^3.7
• roots/acorn: ^5.0|^6.0

Requires (Dev)

• carthage-software/mago: ^1.0
• pondeplu/mago-config: ^1.0

MIT

• Pondeplu

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-08-20 20:32 UTC

README

IDE autocompletion for Roots Acorn projects. Wraps barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper so it runs inside WordPress, with the configuration and output paths an Acorn install actually needs.

Without it, Order::create(), Product::find() and $order->name are invisible to your editor: those members don't exist on Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model. They're forwarded through __callStatic() to the query builder, or resolved through __get() against database columns, and a static analyser can only see what's declared or documented.

Installation

composer require --dev pondeplu/acorn-ide-helper

Acorn auto-discovers the service provider via extra.acorn.providers. Then, from an environment that can reach the database (the model documentation is generated by reading the schema):

wp acorn ide-helper

That writes _ide_helper.php and _ide_helper_models.php to the Acorn base path. Add both to .gitignore — they're regenerated, not authored:

_ide_helper.php
_ide_helper_models.php
.phpstorm.meta.php

What gets generated

_ide_helper.php holds two things:

• A root-level class Eloquent extends \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model, whose body spells out every Eloquent\Builder and Query\Builder method as a real public static function. This is where create(), find() and where() come from.
• The facades — Illuminate\Support\Facades\Log, DB, Cache and friends — redeclared in their own namespaces with their static methods written out, which is what makes Log::info() resolve. These are genuine duplicate declarations; see the Intelephense section below.

_ide_helper_models.php documents each model individually: columns as @property, relations as @property-read, the where* magic as @method static.

How your models reach \Eloquent is what the strategies below decide.

Strategies

_ide_helper.php covers the facades. How your models reach \Eloquent is the part with a real choice in it, and the answer depends on what your editor does with @mixin. Set strategy in config/acorn-ide-helper.php (publish it with wp acorn vendor:publish --provider="Pondeplu\IdeHelper\Providers\IdeHelperServiceProvider"), or override per run with --strategy=.

docblock (default)

Writes everything into the model's own docblock: columns as @property, relations as @property-read, the where* magic as @method static — plus the query-builder statics (create, find, where, updateOrCreate, …) as real @method static tags, supplied by this package's BuilderMethods hook.

One declaration per model and no @mixin anywhere in the resolution path, which is what makes it hold up in Intelephense on any licence. The cost is a generated docblock of roughly 80–130 lines living in each model file, which you commit.

The hook's list is curated — Eloquent\Builder and Query\Builder expose over 400 public methods between them — so if you call something it doesn't cover, add your own ModelHookInterface to ide-helper.model_hooks beside it.

stub

Leaves models untouched and declares class Order extends \Eloquent {} in _ide_helper_models.php, alongside the real class.

Verified not to work reliably in Intelephense. It merges the two declarations for completion and for hover on the class itself, but a call site inside the indexed workspace can still bind the real declaration — the one without create() — so Order::create() types as mixed. The same file resolves correctly when opened from outside the workspace, which makes this look like a caching bug rather than the ambiguity it is. Kept for editors that handle duplicate declarations better than Intelephense does.

mixin

A one-line @mixin IdeHelperOrder per model, with the tags on class IdeHelperOrder {}. Tidiest by far — nothing declared twice and the models stay readable — but the chain Order → IdeHelperOrder → \Eloquent is @mixin at every hop, and Intelephense lists @mixin support as Premium. On the free build it resolves nothing at all. PhpStorm reads it either way.

Pick one per project and commit it. They write different artifacts, so mixing them across a team leaves dangling references behind.

Commands

wp acorn ide-helper                     # facades + models, using the configured strategy
wp acorn ide-helper --strategy=mixin    # override for this run
wp acorn ide-helper --meta              # also write .phpstorm.meta.php (PhpStorm only)

The underlying ide-helper:generate, ide-helper:models, ide-helper:meta and ide-helper:eloquent commands remain available if you need their individual options.