Configure PHP Storm for WordPress

PHP Storm isn’t free, the learning curve is a little steep, and configuration can be difficult. But that first time you click  ⌥ + ⌘ + L and watch all of your => line up underneath each other like little soldiers, or hover over a hook and type ⌘ + B and get whisked to the original function declaration in the WordPress Core, or generate custom doc blocks, or type forek and it generates all the syntax for a foreach loop …. ???? + ????!

Below is my attempt to walk you through the setup so that you can start leveraging this powerful IDE to build WordPress sites with ease. Here’s are the steps:

In terminal

1. Install PHP Code Sniffer globally with Composer

Assuming you already have Composer installed, run the following from the command line :

composer global require "squizlabs/php_codesniffer=*"

2. Add the path to your $PATH variable so terminal can find it

Open your .bash_profile or .zshrc file and add the following so that terminal can find the global path:

export PATH="$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH"

$ which phpcs

check the path to see if it was successfully installed:

which should return:

$ /Users/[yourname]/.composer/vendor/bin/phpcs

3. Download the WordPress Coding Standards to a new directory (below I created an empty directory called wpcs)

$ git clone [email protected]:WordPress-Coding-Standards/WordPress-Coding-Standards.git wpcs

4. Add the WPCS to PHPCS

$ phpcs --config-set installed_paths /Users/[yourname]/wpcs

In PHP Storm

1. Navigate to: Preferences (⌘,) > Languages & Frameworks > PHP > Frameworks
2. Check Enable WordPress Integration
3. Set the path to your Public folder (or whatever root directory that contains your entire WordPress installation)

4. Click Validate + OK

Add the phpcs executable file path

1. Navigate to: Preferences (⌘,) > Languages & Frameworks > PHP > Quality Tools > Code Sniffer

2. Click on the … to bring up the path field and add the path to your file

3. Click Validate + OK

Choose the WordPress Coding Standards from the Coding Standard Drop-down

1. Navigate to: Preferences (⌘,) > Editor > Inspections > PHP > Quality Tools > PHP
2. Click/check Code Sniffer Validation
3. Hit the refresh button in the Coding Standards drop down

4. Choose a WordPress coding standard from the drop-down

5. Repeat steps for Default so you have the above set-up going forward