IDE extensions
The tools we looked at so far share something in common: they need to be applied to our code after we have written it. Of course, this is much better than nothing, but wouldn’t it be great if the tools gave us their feedback immediately at the time that we wrote the code?
That is what many other developers thought as well, so they created extensions for the most popular IDEs, which are currently Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and PhpStorm:
- PhpStorm is an established, commercial IDE from JetBrains with several PHP-specific tools, checks, and built-in integrations for many of the code quality tools we discussed in this chapter. There are many useful extensions available for it as well. You can try it out for 30 days for free.
- VS Code is a highly flexible code editor from Microsoft with tons of third-party (partly commercial) extensions that can turn these tools into an IDE for virtually every relevant programming language today. Because the code editor...