We've curated a collection of essential plugins for PhpStorm that we think you’ll enjoy. From our favorite theme to Laravel-specific tools to supercharge your PHP development and a free AI-powered autocomplete/chat plugin that feels like magic.
Nord Theme
Nord (JetBrains Marketplace) is an arctic, north-bluish, clean, and elegant JetBrains IDE UI and editor color theme. Designed for a fluent and clear workflow based on the Nord color palette.
Laravel Idea
The Laravel Idea plugin is an Efficient Laravel Development Environment for PhpStorm. This premium plugin (~$4.90 USD/mo) adds amazing productivity features to Laravel applications:
- Autocompletion for routes: Laravel Idea provides intelligent autocompletion for routes, making it faster and easier to work with routes in your Laravel projects.
- Eloquent models support: Enjoy enhanced support for Eloquent models, including autocompletion, navigation, and code generation, to boost your productivity.
- Validation rule support: Laravel Idea offers comprehensive autocompletion for validation rules, ensuring accurate and efficient validation code.
- Advanced code generation: The plugin streamlines your workflow by providing code generation capabilities, helping you write code more quickly and efficiently.
- Focus on what matters: By automating routine and repetitive tasks, Laravel Idea allows you to concentrate on the work that truly matters, saving you time and effort.
Check out laravel-idea.com to get started!
The author of Laravel Idea also created the following plugin we’ll cover, .env files support, which makes working with .env values in your PHP code a breeze.
.env Files Support
The .env files support (JetBrains Marketplace) plugin gives you variable auto-completion, which is very useful when you need to wire up a .env value to a Laravel configuration value. It also supports the following features:
- Environment variables completion based on .env, Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml files.
- Go to declaration(in .env file) and usages(in code), by Ctrl(Cmd)+click or hot key(Ctrl(Cmd)-B, etc.)
- .env file syntax highlighter
EditorConfig (bundled)
EditorConfig makes coding styles consistent for multiple developers working on the same project across various IDEs and editors. This bundled plugin should be enabled by default, but make sure your project has a .editorconfig file to take advantage of these features. Laravel projects ship with an .editorconfig file, and you can see that through this bundled plugin, you can easily navigate and configure code style for each file type and see what styles extend others at a glance:
Collector - A Collection Plugin
Collector (JetBrains Marketplace) adds support for Laravel collections, including a bunch of useful refactorings for making collections better. It can also convert normal PHP statements like foreach and array_map into collections.
Codeium: AI Autocomplete and Chat
Codeium is a free AI Code Completion and Chat tool that is comparable to GitHub copilot. It offers autocomplete and is available for a number of editors, including PHPStorm. You can grab this plugin for PHPstorm on the JetBrains marketplace.
IntelliVue
The IntelliVue (JetBrains Marketplace) plugin for IntelliJ provides analysis, actions, and utilities for Vue Single File Components. This plugin adds additional functionality on top of the standard Vue plugin. Full undo-redo support is enabled, so you are assured that your important code will not get corrupted by unexpected operations. Actions and Intentions are added to create and navigate from references to implementation. When creating a new Vue component option, a dialog is displayed.
I like how I can easily implement the JavaScript needed for variables in the template using the “Create Vue Implementation” action:
That’s a wrap on our essential plugins for PhpStorm users. I hope you've found something useful to make your development with PhpStorm better! We can't share every single extension, so let us know your favorite PhpStorm plugin or theme we didn't share!
