Find errors without running your code!

Hassle of finding code errors!

Finding errors in your code without interrupting your code could be something normal for a lot of people, but imagine that you have an old code base or a legacy code.

You will have thousands of files, most probably will have a lot of logical errors, for example: functions return multiple types of data…etc.

This scenario couldn’t happen if you use compiled language, a strongly typed language.

Languages!

As a PHP developer using a dynamic language one doesn't have to specify methods to return types or variables, at some times you could make a function return with user object in condition and in another condition could return string for example “user not found.”.

Could be given for you but as a code standard and quality you could get confused when this method is called because it should be return [ex User instance] and when you try to call a method from this instance you could get error Cannot call method on string.

Maybe you don’t consider it a problem or you are handling it with check return type of functions, but if you are working on large scale projects with many team members you will get something like lag in development or have a good understanding of what this function returns exactly.

At Intcore, we have lots of quality standards of coding and to make code review easier, to make sure the development process is going smoothly and avoid random errors or sudden errors could happen in some scenarios and others not.

For example you could get this error before defining a variable inside if condition and return this variable outside if condition, and as a good scenario you think in your subconscious it will pass!

I will use PHPStan package from github to test my code for fresh project based on laravel

Let’s go!

Okay, let's think about that this code has actually worked, if you read where is the error exactly, you will find this error in exception handler in laravel.

Let’s explore!

Code looks perfect but there are 2 small issues; 

1. In function’s comment, it is defined that function should return instance of \Illuminate\Http\Response but the function is returned instance of App\User

2. User variable is defined inside if condition and we tried to return variable after the if condition.

These could seem like small issues but on a big scale project and legacy code base, thousands of issues were found, we have a big issue with random issues appear on production and fields queues, after fixing these issues we almost passed 80% of issues. 

By the way, there is a lot of packages providing the same functionality of Phpsan and there are multiple levels of testing your code you can select the level of code quality you need to check.

Stay tuned for more of our articles on our blog.