Code Quality and Security for PHP

This SonarSource project is a static code analyzer for PHP language used as an extension for the SonarQube platform.It will allow you to produce stable and easily supported projects with integrated code quality and security by helping you find and correct bugs, vulnerabilities and smells in your code.

Features

• 200+ rules
• Supports up to PHP 8.4
• Metrics (complexity, number of lines, etc.)
• Import of unit test and coverage results
• Support of custom rules

Useful links

• Project homepage
• Documentation
• Issue tracking
• Available rules
• SonarSource Community Forum
• Demo project analysis

More documentation

• Control Flow Graph documentation

Have questions or feedback?

To provide feedback (request a feature, report a bug, etc.) use the SonarSource Community Forum. Please do not forget to specify the language (PHP!), plugin version, and SonarQube version.

If you have a question on how to use plugin (and the docs don't help you), we also encourage you to use the community forum.

Contributing

Topic in SonarSource Community Forum

To request a new feature, please create a new thread in SonarSource Community Forum. Even if you plan to implement it yourself and submit it back to the community, please start a new thread first to be sure that we can follow up on it.

Pull Request (PR)

To submit a contribution, create a pull request for this repository. Please make sure that you follow our code style and that all tests are passing.

Custom Rules

If you have an idea for a rule, but you are not sure that everyone needs it you can implement a custom rule available only for you.

Custom Rules API Changes

• 3.32 (October 2023)
  • Additional newIssue endpoint added to the CheckContext API interface
• 3.15 (January 2021)
  • PHPCustomRulesDefinition was removed, it was deprecated since version 2.13 (March 2018)
  • Removed dependency on sslr-squid-bridge which is not maintained anymore
• 3.11, support of PHP 8:
  • ParameterTree#type() is deprecated. Use ParameterTree#declaredType() instead.
  • ReturnTypeClauseTree#type() is deprecated. Use ReturnTypeClauseTree#declaredType() instead.
  • ClassPropertyDeclarationTree#typeAnnotation() is deprecated. Use ClassPropertyDeclarationTree#declaredType() instead.
  • CatchBlockTree#variable() can now return NULL.
  • FunctionCallTree#arguments() is deprecated. Use FunctionCallTree#callArguments() instead.
  • AnonymousClassTree#arguments() is deprecated. Use AnonymousClassTree#callArguments() instead.
  • New tree: CallArgumentTree. This tree wraps expressions passed as arguments now.
  • New kind of expression: ThrowExpressionTree.
  • New kind of expression: MatchExpressionTree.
  • ParameterTree now has a visibility method.

Testing

To run tests locally follow these instructions.

To configure build dependencies, run the following command:

git submodule update --init -- build-logic/common

To always get the latest version of the build logic during git operations, set the following configuration:

git config submodule.recurse true

Build the Project and Run Unit Tests

To build the plugin and run its unit tests, execute this command from the project's root directory:

./gradlew build

Integration Tests

To run integration tests, you will need to create a properties file like the one shown below, and set its location in an environment variable named ORCHESTRATOR_CONFIG_URL.

# version of SonarQube server
sonar.runtimeVersion=9.9

Before running any of the integration tests make sure the submodules are checked out:

  git submodule update --init

Plugin Test

The "Plugin Test" is an additional integration test that verifies plugin features such as metric calculation, coverage, etc. To launch it:

./gradlew its:plugin:integrationTest

Ruling Test

The "Ruling Test" is a special integration test that launches the analysis of a large code base, saves the issues created by the plugin in report files, and then compares those results to the set of expected issues (stored as JSON files). To launch the ruling test:

./gradlew its:ruling:integrationTest

This test gives you the opportunity to examine the issues created by each rule and make sure they're what you expect. You can inspect new/lost issues by checking the SonarQube local URL mentioned in the logs at the end of the analysis. If everything looks good to you, you can copy the file with the actual issues located at

sonar-php/its/ruling/target/actual/

into the directory with the expected issues

sonar-php/its/ruling/src/test/resources/expected/

Rule Descriptions

Update Rule Descriptions

To update all rule descriptions:

./gradlew ruleApiUpdate

Generate New Rule Description

To fetch static files for a rule SXXXX from RSPEC:

./gradlew ruleApiGenerateRule -Prule=SXXXX

Same for a specific RSPEC branch (master by default):

./gradlew ruleApiGenerateRule -Prule=SXXXX -Pbranch=my-branch

License

Copyright 2010-2025 SonarSource.

SonarQube analyzers released after November 29, 2024, including patch fixes for prior versions, are published under the Sonar Source-Available License Version 1 (SSALv1).

See individual files for details that specify the license applicable to each file. Files subject to the SSALv1 will be noted in their headers.