Development Tools

Developers need good tools to be able to work productively. On this page we give an overview of the most important tools for PHP development.

We love Open Source and therefore do not like to advocate for commercial products. An exception to this is PhpStorm , an IDE that we believe is indispensable for professional PHP development.

Composer and PHIVE are the standard tools for managing dependencies in a PHP project. Composer is responsible for dependencies that are required for the execution of the software. PHIVE is used to manage development tools that are distributed as PHP archives (PHAR).

PHP-CS-Fixer is the tool of choice for uniformly formatting the code of a PHP project.

Psalm and PHPStan are two recommended tools to detect type errors before they can become a problem when running code.

PHPUnit is the standard tool for writing and executing automated tests for PHP code. Infection supports writing new tests as well as evaluating the quality of existing tests.

Xdebug is an extension for the PHP interpreter that provides debugging, code coverage, profiling and tracing functionality.

Git is the standard for distributed version management of files, especially source code files.