Tool

A tool in the PHP ecosystem refers to any standalone application, script, or library that assists developers during the software development lifecycle. Tools are usually run from the command line and support activities such as static analysis, code formatting, testing, dependency management, profiling, deployment, and documentation generation.

<?php

// Example: running a tool programmatically via Symfony Process
use Symfony\Component\Process\Process;

$process = new Process(['vendor/bin/phpstan', 'analyse', 'src', '--level=8']);
$process->run();

if (!$process->isSuccessful()) {
    echo $process->getErrorOutput();
}

?>

Documentation

See also Awesome PHP Tools.

Related : Composer, Command Line Interface (CLI), Analysis, Linting, DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI), Static Code Analysis (SCA), Model Context Protocol (MCP), Debugger, Software Development Kit (SDK)