Silver Assist Coding Standards

Framework-agnostic PHPCS ruleset (PSR-12 + mandatory PHPDoc) and a PHPStan base config, shared by every Silver Assist PHP project — WordPress plugin or not.

This package intentionally has zero WordPress dependencies. WordPress plugins should require silverassist/wp-coding-standards instead, which requires this package and layers WordPress-Extra, i18n, and naming-convention sniffs on top.

Install

composer require --dev silverassist/coding-standards

Installing via Composer (private repository)

SilverAssist packages are installed from their GitHub repositories with a Composer vcs repository, not from Packagist.org. Those repositories can require authentication, so always configure a token.

1. Declare the repository in your project's root composer.json. Composer only reads repositories from the root package, so every SilverAssist package your project needs must be listed there, including transitive ones:

   {
     "repositories": [
       { "type": "vcs", "url": "https://github.com/SilverAssist/coding-standards" }
     ],
     "require-dev": {
       "silverassist/coding-standards": "^1.0"
     }
   }

2. Authenticate with a GitHub token that can read the repository:

   • Locally: composer config --global github-oauth.github.com <token>
   • CI: set COMPOSER_AUTH='{"github-oauth":{"github.com":"<token>"}}' from a secret (a GitHub Actions secret or a Bitbucket variable).

   Never commit a token or an auth.json. Without a token, Composer hits GitHub's anonymous API limit (60 requests per hour per IP) and falls back to an SSH clone.

3. Refresh the lock file if your project commits composer.lock: run composer update --lock after adding repositories, so the lock file's content-hash matches composer.json.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause
Failed to clone the git@github.com:SilverAssist/coding-standards.git repository, try running in interactive mode... followed by Permission denied (publickey)	The token is missing or has no access to the repository.
remote: Invalid username or token	The token is invalid or expired.
it could not be found in any version	The vcs entry is missing from the root composer.json.

Usage — PHPCS

Create a phpcs.xml in your project (this package never scans files itself — it only ships the rule definitions):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ruleset name="YourProject">
    <arg name="colors"/>
    <arg value="p"/>
    <config name="php_version" value="80200"/>

    <file>src</file>

    <rule ref="SilverAssist"/>
</ruleset>

Run it:

vendor/bin/phpcs

Migrating a legacy codebase

If PHPDoc type-hint enforcement is too strict for code that hasn't been typed yet (see senioradvicecom-wp's strangler-fig migration), exclude just those two sub-sniffs locally:

<rule ref="SilverAssist">
    <exclude name="Squiz.Commenting.FunctionComment.TypeHintMissing"/>
    <exclude name="Squiz.Commenting.FunctionComment.ScalarTypeHintMissing"/>
</rule>

Usage — PHPStan

# phpstan.neon
includes:
    - vendor/silverassist/coding-standards/phpstan/base.neon

parameters:
    paths:
        - src
    bootstrapFiles:
        - bootstrap.php

Legacy projects that can't yet run at level 8 can override it after the include:

includes:
    - vendor/silverassist/coding-standards/phpstan/base.neon

parameters:
    level: 6
    paths:
        - src
    includes:
        - phpstan-baseline.neon

What's deliberately NOT here

• WordPress sniffs (WordPress-Extra, i18n, escaping/sanitization, PrefixAllGlobals) — see silverassist/wp-coding-standards.
• The LoadableInterface / Plugin::instance() bootstrap pattern — see silverassist/wp-plugin-kernel.
• CI/CD workflow templates — those live in silverassist/wp-coding-standards too, since the reference implementations (WordPress Test Suite matrix, release ZIP building) are WordPress-plugin specific. A non-WP project like senioradvicecom-wp runs PHPCS/PHPStan/PHPUnit directly in its own pipeline instead of via a reusable workflow.

See also

• AGENTS.md — instructions for AI coding agents working in this repo.