Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring
Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring
About the Book
Rector is an extremely powerful tool that can instantly improve the code quality of your PHP projects.
It can be used to safely migrate projects from PHP 5.3 to PHP 8.4.
It can help you establish a standard of robust programming practices in your project. And it can save you a lot of time spent on reviewing pull requests.
In this book, seasoned developers Matthias Noback and Tomas Votruba give you all the information you need to become a Rector power user. You'll learn:
- How to make Rector part of your daily development workflow
- How to create Rector rules that replace repetitive manual refactoring work
- How to automate even more with Rector by adding it to your project's build process
Tomas, being the founding father and core maintainer of the Rector project, will shine his light on:
- What's the place of Rector in the larger ecosystem of PHP tools for code quality assurance?
- What role will Rector fulfill in the future?
Matthias, who has a strong focus on automated testing, will cover:
- The concepts behind Rector: tokenizing, parsing, and manipulating PHP AST nodes
- Test-driven development techniques for creating automated refactorings
What readers say
"I've been following Rector for a couple of years now. I've been very excited by the claims and demos but try as I might to get an understanding and a usable knowledge I just couldn't... until the book. Now within the space of a few days I have started to integrate Rector into a 20-year-old project (with a couple million lines of code) at work. My commits have increased, I have been able to find way more problems early on in code reviews, and I have started to clean up a lot of legacy spaghetti code.
Many thanks for the book, it has really really.... REALLY helped!"
-- Steve Hyde
"Grabbed my copy. This was an absolute nobrainer.
(one day later)
I already read through the whole thing. Nice work. Next step is to create some rules"
-- @psren
"The book is easy to read in a complex subject to me. Congrats both on your excellent work!!"
-- @KPikaza
"18 years ago, I bought my first technical book ever PHP 4 Bible. To master how to automatically refactor code using the same language on which it is written is something I could've not foreseen back then."
-- Oscar Nevarez
"I read most of the book already. Learned lots about the abstract syntax tree and how to create and test Rector rules. I can recommend any PHP developer to read this book!"
-- Tijmen Wierenga
"Purchased! My mind is already buzzing with ideas on how to use this on a legacy PHP project I just took over."
-- Joel Clermont
About the Authors
Bundles that include this book
Table of Contents
-
Preface
- A Trainer’s Journey
- The Other Side
- Who’s Fault is It?
- From Blame to Pain
- From Pain to Idea
- From Idea to First Real Reconstructor
- We’ve Just Started, Now You Get on Board
-
Introduction
- What is Rector?
- Who Should Read This Book?
- An Overview of the Contents
- About the Code Samples
-
About the Authors
- Matthias Noback
- Tomas Votruba
- Acknowledgements
-
Programmatically Modifying PHP Code
- Introduction
- Primitive Ways of Modifying Code
- Tokenizing PHP Code
- Parsing PHP Tokens: the Abstract Syntax Tree
- Converting the AST Back to PHP Code
- Manipulating the AST
- Node Visitors
- Manipulating the AST with a Node Visitor
-
Built-in Node Visitors
- Resolving Fully-qualified Names
- Finding Nodes
- Summary
-
PHP Tools in the Game
- Introduction
- Working Together with Giants
- 2007 - Now Timeline
- The Primary Feature
-
1. Coding Standard Tools
- PHP_CodeSniffer
- PHP CS Fixer
- Easy Coding Standard
-
2. Static Analyzers
- PHP-Parser
- PHPStan
- Psalm
-
3. Instant Upgrade Tools
- Symfony-Upgrade-Fixer
- Rector
- When to Use Which Tool?
- Is Your Project Bare Without Any Tools?
- Run Rector First, Then Polish with Coding Standards
- Recommended Tools
- Summary
-
Creating Your First Rector Rule
- Introduction
- What’s a Rector Rule?
- Creating a Custom Rule
-
Extending AbstractRector
- Finding the Right Node Class
- Expr vs Stmt
- Running a Single Rule
-
Refactoring the Method Call Node
- What Is the Type of a Variable?
-
What if We Run Rector Twice?
- Effectivity Beats Perfection
- Summary
-
Test-driven Rule Development
- Introduction
- Migrating from DateTime to DateTimeImmutable
- Creating a Test Class
- Adding First Test Fixture
- Making the First Test Pass
- Narrowing the Scope of the Refactoring
- Capturing the Return Value of modify()
- Skipping Calls on Classes That Are Not DateTime
- Summary
-
More Testing Techniques
- Rules Should Be Idempotent
- Removing the Clone Step
- Low-Hanging Fruit First
- Create a Configurable Generic Rule
- Making Rule Behavior Configurable
- Configurable Rule Makes Hidden Assumptions Explicit
- Using Supporting Classes in Fixtures
- Summary
-
Continuous Rectifying
- Introduction
- The Next Member of Your Team
- Turning a Junior Into a Senior on Day 1
- Who’s to Blame?
- What Does it Look Like to Work with Rector in CI?
- How Rector is Rectifying Itself
- Removing Boring Work Opens Your Creativity
- Summary
-
Rector + CI = Next Member of Your Team
- Introduction
- What are The Steps for a Rector Run?
-
How to Add Rector to GitHub Actions
- 1. Generic PHP Setup
- 2. Rector Setup
- Allow Rector to contribute the Pull Request
- Summary
-
The Future of Instant Upgrades
- Introduction
-
Removing Legacy
- How Can We Be So Confident?
- A Member of your Team That Sends Pull-Requests Daily
- PHP Stands Out
- Epilogue
- Node Type and Refactor Examples
-
Book Revisions
- Update 2025-03-07
- Update 2024-12-09 and Rector 2.0
- Update 2024-02-07 and Rector 1.0
- Update 2024-01-30 and Rector 0.19.3
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