Get this book on Leanpub

A couple of weeks ago, Tomas Votruba emailed me saying that he just realized that we hadn’t published an update of the book we wrote together since December 2021. The book I’m talking about is “Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring”. Two years have passed since we published the current version. Of course, we’re all very busy, but no time for excuses - this is a book about keeping projects up-to-date with almost no effort… We are meant to set an example here!

When you’re learning to write custom rules for PHPStan or Rector, you’ll have to learn more about the PHP programming language as well. To be more precise, about the way the interpreter parses PHP code. The result of parsing PHP code is a tree of nodes which represents the structure of the code, e.g. you’ll have a Class definition node, a Method definition node, and within those method Statement nodes, and so on. Each node can be checked for errors (with PHPStan), or automatically refactored in some way (with Rector).

TLDR;

Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring is now 100% completed

Tomas Votruba and I first met a couple of years ago at one of my favorite conferences; the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam (so actually, we’re very close to our anniversary, Tomas!). He presented Rector there and it was really inspiring. A year later I was working on a legacy migration problem: our team wanted to migrate from Doctrine ORM to “ORM-less”, with handwritten mapping code, etc. I first tried Laminas Code, a code generation tool, but it lacked many features, and also the precision that I needed. Suddenly I recalled Rector, and decided to give it a try. After some experimenting, everything worked and I learned that this tool really is amazingly powerful!

In October 2020 I asked Tomáš Votruba, the mastermind behind Rector, if we could have a little chat about this tool. I wanted to learn more about it and had spent a couple of days experimenting with it. Tomáš answered all my questions, which was tremendously valuable to me personally. When this happens I normally feel the need to share: there should be some kind of artefact that can be published, so others can also learn about Rector and how to extend it based on your own refactoring needs.