All 7 Static Analysis (PHPStan & Psalm) questions
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What is static analysis, and how do tools like PHPStan and Psalm help catch bugs in PHP code before it is even run? What are analysis levels in PHPStan, and why would a project typically start at a lower level before gradually increasing strictness? How do type declarations and PHPDoc comments help a static analysis tool understand your code more accurately and catch more potential issues? How does Psalm's concept of taint analysis help detect potential security vulnerabilities like SQL injection or cross site scripting during static analysis? How can integrating a static analysis tool into a continuous integration pipeline help enforce consistent code quality across an entire team, and what are common strategies for managing false positives? How do custom PHPStan or Psalm rules and extensions let a team enforce their own project specific coding standards and catch domain specific mistakes beyond the tool's built in checks?
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What is a baseline file in PHPStan, and how does it help a team adopt static analysis on an existing project without needing to fix every single issue immediately?

Intermediate

Answer

A baseline file records every currently existing issue that static analysis finds in a codebase at a specific point in time, effectively telling the tool to ignore those specific already known issues going forward, while still reporting any brand new issue introduced afterward, which lets a team immediately start enforcing static analysis on all new code being written without first needing to pause everything and fix potentially hundreds of preexisting issues throughout an older, large codebase all at once.
vendor/bin/phpstan analyse --generate-baseline
Real-world example A team adopting PHPStan on a five year old codebase generates a baseline capturing the several hundred existing issues, then configures their continuous integration pipeline to fail only on any brand new issue introduced in future pull requests, letting them adopt the tool immediately without a massive one time cleanup effort.

Common follow-ups: How should a team periodically work down the size of an existing baseline file over time?;What happens to the baseline file when a genuinely fixed issue is later removed from the actual code?

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All 7 Static Analysis (PHPStan & Psalm) questions