SVN Pre-commit duty: Lint your PHP

September 21st, 2008 by Aaron

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We’ve all been there before, committing code - and then realizing that it was broken (hrm - our unit test didn’t catch it? or… “what unit test?” if you’re in another environment). Well, there is a solution.

Batch File Fun!

Since I dev primarily on windows, I wrote a batch file. You can also write a linux script using awk in bash (or insert your fav shell here) that will do basically the same thing. From now on, especially at #superdev, I’m going to run “lint.bat” before I commit:

lint.bat

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@echo off
echo.
echo Starting SVN Stat + PHP Lint
echo ============================
svn stat |findstr /I /R "\.php$ \.phtml$" >lint.txt
for /F "tokens=2 delims= " %%i in (lint.txt) do php -l %%i |findstr /I /B /V "No syntax errors"
del lint.txt
echo.
echo ============================
echo Finished SVN Stat + PHP Lint

So what is happening?

Basically, when you run “lint.bat” in the root of your repository, you’ll see a start and end message. If you’re lucky, nothing will be between the two double bars. If you’re not lucky, then you know what you need to fix before you commit. But, here’s what is really happening:

Basic Batch File Stuff

Turn off the command echo (@echo off), and print some context (starting the test).

SVN stat of PHP files

Run an SVN stat and grab files that end with .php or .phtml. If you have other files that need to be ran through the php interpreter, you can add them, space delimited, in this “almost” regular expression format. Note the “$” which signifies that the pattern match should be at the end of the string. Output this to a file called ‘lint.txt’ - hopefully this not part of your code repository!

Loop through and look for syntax errors

Loop through each line of that stat file and run the php interpreter against it. If the message does not begin with “No syntax errors”, display the error message to the console.

Clean up and end

Delete the lint.txt file, and then finish up by printing some nice message and double bar.

Things to remember

Both ’svn’ and ‘php’ should be in your system path. Also, the user who is running the lint.bat file should have permission to write files into the current working directory. Finally, if you have more than .php and .phtml files, modify the regular expression to find all of the files that need linting!

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Tags: PHP, svn

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 12:08 am and is filed under PHP • svn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “SVN Pre-commit duty: Lint your PHP”

1. Travis Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 11:25 am

   Wouldn’t it also work to simply grab *all* files from the output of svn stat and run those through the linting process? Unless I’m terribly mistaken, the PHP parser will essentially ignore everything that isn’t between tags (or if you have short tags enabled) - this way, if you get crazy and start doing .pjs or .pcss files, or if you happen to have code where included files have a .inc extension, or any other such ridiculousness, your lint script still works, and it shouldn’t really take all that much extra time for PHP to say “Oh look, there’s no PHP in this file, moving on!”

2. Aaron Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 12:03 pm

   @Travis: I thought about this - but SVN Stat can generate output for modified folders - and PHP will then start spitting out all these messages like “Cannot open input file”. I did not want those to pop up. Good points on adding in new file extensions - you’ll just have to remember what they are and modify the script!

3. Travis Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 3:44 pm

   Good point, Aaron, hadn’t thought of that. Guess I’ll have to actually work instead of being that lazy.

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