Wrangling code with the Shift Workbench desktop app

Published on August 24th, 2021 by Eric L. Barnes

Last month Shift released the Workbench desktop application. This is a port of the cloud-based Workbench which allows you to run all of its automated tasks conveniently from your local machine. There are over 50 tasks to help you maintain and modernize your Laravel and PHP code. The Workbench desktop application is free to download and a majority of its tasks are free to run.

Recently, the Workbench added a few premium tasks for streamlining your Laravel code, including:

Removing down migrations: as applications grow in size and in complexity, it becomes less common to run migrate:rollback. This task automatically removes the down method from your migrations, as well as updates the stub file for migrations so new migrations generated with make:migration exclude the down method.
Adopting anonymous migrations: to avoid annoying naming collisions, Laravel now supports anonymous migrations. This task converts your existing migrations to anonymous classes and updates the stub file for migrations so new migrations generated with make:migration use an anonymous class.
Removing default DocBlocks: when using make commands or copying from the docs, the code often includes large PHP DocBlocks. These DocBlocks may account for a majority of the lines of code and may be redundant if you are using type-hints. This task automatically removes many of the DocBlocks which are copied directly from framework code.
Formatting test cases: for applications with large test suites, you may have a mixed code style for your test cases. For example, PHPUnit uses a camelCase naming convention and prefixes test cases with test. Laravel applications often use a snake_case naming convention and denote test cases with the @test annotation. This automated task allows you to format your test cases using either the PHPUnit convention, Laravel convention, or configure your own custom convention.

Premium tasks are available with purchase of a 1-year license (currently offered at a significant discount). You may also receive a license with a subscription to the Latest Shifty Plan.

If you're interested in hearing more about building the Workbench desktop application, listen to the latest miniseries of the BaseCode Podcast; where Jess Archer and Jason McCreary discuss pairing up to build the Shift Workbench desktop app.