Larastan: Discover Bugs in Your Code Before Running It

Larastan is a static analysis command-line tool by Nuno Maduro built on top of PHPStan and focuses on finding errors in your Laravel code before running it. If you’ve ever used PhpStorm, you’ve probably experienced static analysis of your PHP code both in realtime and within code inspections.

Laravel takes advantage of PHP’s magic methods (i.e., __get()) for some of the framework functionality, and Larastan aims to analyze code that relies on magic methods and report any possible bugs.

Once you install Larastan with Composer, you can use the project’s Artisan command on Laravel applications:

# Install
composer require --dev nunomaduro/larastan
 
# Analyze code
php artisan code:analyse

The code:analyse command has a few flags that will help you customize the analysis:

# Default is 5 - 0 is the loosest, and 7 the strictest
php artisan code:analyse --level=[0-7]
 
# Analyze specific paths
php artisan code:analyse --paths="modules,app,domain"

You can also use Larastan to analyze code for Laravel packages, with a phpstan.neon.dist configuration file in the root of your package:

includes:
    - ./vendor/nunomaduro/larastan/extension.neon
parameters:
    level: 5
    paths:
        - src

As of writing, Larastan is not quite a v1.0 stable release yet. However, it’s ready enough for consumption as a dev dependency. The project could benefit from testers trying it out and reporting back false positives or any other issues found.

Nuno Maduro is responsible for a host of console tools that we enjoy in the Laravel community, from Collision (ships with Laravel by default) to Laravel Zero, a micro-framework for console/command line applications.

This project has been and continues to be, a community effort. The community has been working hard to improve analysis of dynamic code, with over 57 pull requests on the project as of this writing.

Check out nunomaduro/larastan on GitHub.