Making PHPStan stricter

May 5th, 2024

Continuing yesterday's thought on strictness in PHP, today I want to talk about adding more strictness to PHPStan.

Adding the PHPStan Strict Rules extension makes PHPStan stricter by adding new, more opinionated rules.

For example:

• Require booleans in if, elseif, ternary operator, after !, and on both sides of && and ||.
• Use the $strict parameter with in_array, array_search, array_keys and base64_decode.
• Disallow empty().
• Require calling parent constructor.

You can enable and disable rules as needed but, like setting the PHPStan level, ideally I like to enable them all by default and see how strict I go.

It depends on the code being tested and the preference of the team, though I find the stricter the rules, the less bugs there are.

- Oliver

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