Using PHPCompatibilityJoomla, you can analyse the codebase of a Joomla-based project for PHP cross-version compatibility.

A ruleset for PHP_CodeSniffer to check for PHP cross-version compatibility issues in projects based on the Joomla CMS.

This Joomla specific ruleset prevents false positives from the PHPCompatibility standard by excluding back-fills and polyfills which are provided by Joomla.

This project needs funding.

The project team has spend thousands of hours creating and maintaining the PHPCompatibility packages. This is unsustainable without funding.

If you use PHPCompatibility, please fund this work by setting up a monthly contribution to the PHP_CodeSniffer Open Collective.

• PHP > 5.4
• PHP_CodeSniffer >= 3.13.3. Use the latest stable release of PHP_CodeSniffer for the best results.
• PHPCompatibility 10.0.0+.
• PHPCompatibilityParagonie 2.0.0+.
• PHPCompatibilityPasswordCompat 2.0.0+.
• PHPCompatibilitySymfony 2.0.0+.

The only supported installation method is via Composer.

Composer will automatically install the project dependencies and register the external rulesets with PHP_CodeSniffer using the Composer PHPCS plugin.

Run the following from the root of your project:

composer config allow-plugins.dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer true
composer require --dev phpcompatibility/phpcompatibility-joomla:"^3.0@dev"

Next, run:

vendor/bin/phpcs -i

If all went well, you will now see that the PHPCompatibility, PHPCompatibilityJoomla and several other PHPCompatibility standards are installed for PHP_CodeSniffer.

To upgrade this package, run the following command:

composer update --dev phpcompatibility/phpcompatibility-joomla --with-dependencies

You can now use the following command to inspect your code:

vendor/bin/phpcs -p . --standard=PHPCompatibilityJoomla

By default, you will only receive notifications about deprecated and/or removed PHP features.

To get the most out of the PHPCompatibilityJoomla standard, you should specify a testVersion to check against. That will enable the checks for both deprecated/removed PHP features as well as the detection of code using new PHP features.

The minimum PHP requirement of the Joomla project at this time is PHP 5.3.10. If you want to enforce this, either add --runtime-set testVersion 5.3- to your command-line command or add <config name="testVersion" value="5.3-"/> to your custom ruleset.

For example:

# For a project which should be compatible with PHP 5.3 and higher:
vendor/bin/phpcs -p . --standard=PHPCompatibilityJoomla --runtime-set testVersion 5.3-

For more detailed information about setting the testVersion, see the README of the generic PHPCompatibility standard.

By default PHP_CodeSniffer < 4.0 will analyse PHP, JavaScript and CSS files. As the PHPCompatibility sniffs only target PHP code, you can make the run slightly faster by telling PHP_CodeSniffer to only check PHP files, like so:

vendor/bin/phpcs -p . --standard=PHPCompatibilityJoomla --extensions=php --runtime-set testVersion 5.3-

All code within the PHPCompatibility organisation is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). For more information, visit https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html.