Professional PHP Workflow in Sublime Text 3

Visuals Are Important

Because we’ll be starting with a fresh installation of Sublime Text, let’s take a few moments to apply a quick bit of paint to the UI. Visuals are important, so don’t skip this step!

Preferred Settings

Sublime Text offers countless overrides and configuration settings. In this episode, we’ll apply a small handful of the ones I use most often in my own workflow.

Get Around Faster

You’re surely aware of the command-p shortcut for rapidly switching between files, but there are other ways to browse your codebase as well. Let’s review a few of my favorite techniques.

You Need a PHP Companion

Every PHP developer needs to install the SublimePHPCompanion package. It’s not optional. Pull this bad boy in right now, and begin rapidly importing classes, adding constructor arguments, and more.

Create New Files Faster

If you’re manually opening the sidebar and right-clicking to create a new file, there’s an easier way: pull in the AdvancedNewFile package, and save countless hours each day (or about 45 seconds, but still…).

Automate Your Keystrokes

I’m sure you’re familiar with the process of creating basic snippets, but don’t skimp on these. Seek out repeated keystrokes like a hawk. Can you instead translate that repetition into a reusable snippet? In this episode, we’ll review just a few simple, yet enormously useful, expansions. In the process, we’ll also pull in the SnippetMaker package to make the act of extracting snippets much less painful.

PHP Error Detection and Code Sniffing

Out of the box, Sublime Text provides no error detection whatsoever. Forget a semicolon or brace? Sorry, you’re on your own. Certainly, we can’t have that, so let’s pull in the Sublime Linter package to provide instant feedback each time we save a file.

Automatic PHPCS Fixing

It’s great that we can now detect PSR-2 inconsistencies in our projects, but wouldn’t it be nice if those issues could be automatically fixed without requiring an ounce of effort on our parts? And what if we could extend things further to provide extra optimizations? For example, can we automatically remove unused class imports each time we save a file? Well of course we can, thanks to php-cs-fixer.

Seamless Project Management

If you maintain multiple codebases or open-source projects, you may find that manually switching between them can prove cumbersome. Instead, let’s leverage Sublime’s project functionality to ease the burden. We can even pull in the ProjectManager package to simplify things further.

Sync Your Settings Across Multiple Machines

If you work on multiple computers, such as a laptop and main workstation, you’ll likely want to sync your Sublime Text settings between the two. We can accomplish this quite easily by leveraging Dropbox and symlinks. Let’s review the full process in this episode.

Instant PHPUnit Feedback and Workflow

It’s important to find a good workflow for rapidly testing your code. While it’s not too much trouble to manually switch to the command line each time, we can improve things greatly by leveraging the Sublime-PHPUnit package.