I am slowly moving away from Sublime Text to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code due to VS Code’s superior feature-set like a built-in file navigation tree (which is better than ST’s SideBarEnhancements package), IntelliSense and built-in Git.
Below are the steps to have VS Code automatically sniff and display warnings/errors (if any) in your PHP files per WordPress Coding Standards.
Step 1
Install Composer globally.
Step 2
In the system terminal (navigate to your home directory, if you are elsewhere) run
composer create-project wp-coding-standards/wpcs --no-dev
Running this command will
- install WordPress standards into ~/wpcs directory.
- install PHP_CodeSniffer.
- register WordPress standards in PHP_CodeSniffer configuration.
- make
phpcs
command available from ~/wpcs/vendor/bin.
Step 3
Mac
Run
ln -s ~/wpcs/vendor/bin/phpcs /usr/local/bin/phpcs
This will create /usr/local/bin/phpcs
as an alias or symbolic link to ~/wpcs/vendor/bin/phpcs
where ~
is your home directory (Ex.: /Users/sridharkatakam
).
Windows
Go to Control Panel. Search for path
and click on “Edit the system environment variables”.
Click on “Environment Variables…” in the System Properties’ Advanced tab.
In the bottom “System variables” section, select Path
and click Edit.
Add a new entry having this path:
C:\Users\Admin\wpcs\vendor\bin
where Admin
is your current admin-level username.
Step 4
In VS Code, go to Extensions, search for phpcs
and install it.
Bring up your user settings by pressing ⌘, and add
"phpcs.standard": "WordPress"
Step 5
Restart VS Code.
That’s it.
Note:
- To check the value of $PATH environment in a terminal run
echo $PATH
. - To add a directory to $PATH, run
open ~/.bash_profile
. Then in the text editor addexport PATH="/Users/sridharkatakam/wpcs/vendor/bin:$PATH"
where/Users/sridharkatakam/wpcs/vendor/bin
is the directory whose path is to be added.