Discovering Symbols

PHPStan needs to be able to locate symbols (classes, functions, constants) used in the analysed codebase. By default, it looks for them in these two places:

Analysed paths (files and directories) passed as command line arguments and in the configuration file.
Composer dependencies of the analysed project

This covers most common needs.

However, there are some advanced scenarios that might require some additional configuration.

Third party code outside of Composer dependencies #

If your project uses some code that isn’t part of your Composer dependencies, but you don’t wish to analyse it, you can take advantage of scanFiles and scanDirectories config options:

parameters:
    scanFiles:
      - Foo.class.php
    scanDirectories:
      - classes

Relative paths in the scanFiles and scanDirectories keys are resolved based on the directory of the config file is in.

Global constants #

As of PHPStan 1.7.0 nothing special is required to analyse code with global constants.

Show obsolete instructions for older PHPStan versions

Global constants used in the analysed code need to be defined in bootstrap files.

Create a file that looks like this:

<?php

define('MY_CONSTANT', 1);

And add it to your configuration file:

parameters:
    bootstrapFiles:
        - constants.php

Please note that bootstrap files will actually be executed by the PHP runtime.

Class aliases #

This is similar to global constants above. Class aliases used in the analysed code need to be defined in bootstrap files.

Create a file that looks like this:

<?php

class_alias(\Foo::class, 'Bar');

And add it to your configuration file:

parameters:
    bootstrapFiles:
        - classAliases.php

Please note that bootstrap files will actually be executed by the PHP runtime.

Custom autoloader #

If you’re using some other autoloader than the one in Composer, PHPStan can take advantage of it to discover files with autoloaded classes.

You can register the custom autoloader in two ways:

By passing the PHP file that registers the autoloader as --autoload-file|-a on the command line.
By using the bootstrapFiles option:

parameters:
    bootstrapFiles:
        - my_autoloader.php

Please note that the file with the autoloader will actually be executed by the PHP runtime.

PHPUnit as a PHAR #

When you install PHPUnit with Phive, you might encounter similar errors when analysing your tests with PHPStan:

Class App\MyTest extends unknown class PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase.
Call to an undefined static method App\MyTest::assertIsArray().

That’s because PHPStan does not see PHPUnit classes from inside phpunit.phar.

The way to fix it is to put phpunit.phar in bootstrapFiles in your configuration file:

parameters:
    bootstrapFiles:
        - tools/phpunit.phar

Other PHAR files #

If you have difficulties discovering symbols from PHAR files and the above PHPUnit trick does not work for you, try this instead:

parameters:
    scanDirectories:
        - phar://%currentWorkingDirectory%/bin/robo.phar

Disable the symbol discovery error tip #

Available in PHPStan 2.1.12

PHPStan provides a tip with a link to this article whenever it encounters symbol discovery errors.

To disable that tip, add the following to your configuration:

parameters:
    tips:
        discoveringSymbols: false

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