PhpStorm 2017.2 is released

July 20, 2017 / Eric L. Barnes

Today the JetBrains team released PhpStorm 2017.2, the second major update for PhpStorm in 2017. This release brings improvements when working with Composer, Docker Compose, reworked polymorphic types support, automatically run PHPUnit tests and many other enhancements.

The Composer improvements look really fantastic and include the following new features:

Composer Actions

Now you can execute the actions Update Dependencies, Install Dependencies, Remove Dependencies, and Self-update directly from the IDE, without having to switch to the command line.

composer.json settings synchronization

Since composer.json contains the most up-to-date information about the project, the synchronization of new settings between PhpStorm and composer.json ensures that PHP Language Level, PhpStorm Source, and Test folders exactly match the project settings and structure specified in composer.json. This significantly simplifies project configuration in PhpStorm.

Seamless work with composer global installation

Now you can use globally installed composer. PhpStorm detects whether you have it installed and simplifies project creation in case you do. You can also set globally installed composer for existing projects and make it default for all projects. All this will save you time that you spent on looking for the previously downloaded composer.phar or on downloading yet again composer.phar into the project.

For a complete overview of new features check out this video by Gary Hockin: