Static Code analysis in Laravel with Larastan

PHPStan focuses on finding errors in your code. It catches whole classes of bugs even before you write tests for the code.

• Adds static typing to Laravel to improve developer productivity and code quality
• Supports most of Laravel's beautiful magic
• Discovers bugs in your code

Larastan is a phpstan/phpstan wrapper for Laravel. Discover bugs in your code without running it.

Installation

composer require nunomaduro/larastan:^2.0 --dev

Configure

touch phpstan.neon

includes:
    - ./vendor/nunomaduro/larastan/extension.neon

parameters:

    paths:
        - app

    # The level 9 is the highest level
    level: 5

    ignoreErrors:

    excludePaths:
        - ./*/*/FileToBeExcluded.php

    checkMissingIterableValueType: false

Add format script

Update composer.json, add a format script

"scripts": {
  "analyse": "vendor/bin/phpstan analyse",
    "post-autoload-dump": [
        "Illuminate\\Foundation\\ComposerScripts::postAutoloadDump",
        "@php artisan package:discover --ansi"
    ],
}

More

Ignoring errors

Ignoring a specific error can be done either with a php comment or in the configuration file:

// @phpstan-ignore-next-line
$test->badMethod();

$test->badMethod(); // @phpstan-ignore-line

When ignoring errors in PHPStan's configuration file, they are ignored by writing a regex based on error messages:

file: phpstan.neon

parameters:
    ignoreErrors:
        - '#Call to an undefined method .*badMethod\(\)#'

Run analyse

composer analyse

Further (Optional)

Try levelling up the stan level from 5 to 6 and fix the code

# from
level: 5
# to
level: 6

Run analyse

composer analyse

Happy Coding!