Environment and development tools

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Every integrated development environment can be used. However, this is a list of tools highly recommanded to use. They are all famous and a good help as they are featurful and of high quality. They are used by most main Dolibarr developers. Above all, they are all free and Opensource.

For every developer

These are the recommended tools but any tool compliant with PHP, MySQL and Web standards can be used.

An AMP server

• AMP means Apache + MariaDB + PHP

For Linux: These 3 products are available in almost all Linux distributions by default.

For Windows: Install [1] (MariaDB SQL database, Apache and PHP in an all-in-one package) or a comparable system environment (like XAMPP).

The WAMP server offers MariaDB+Apache+PHP, with the option to change the version of any component with a simple click.

Webbrowser (Chrome / Firefox) + plugins

• Chrome + plugins

You can download Chrome from https://www.chrome.com

• Firefox + plugins:
  • HTML Validator
  • User Agent Switcher to simulate usage of smartphones
  • Cert Viewer Plus if you plan to make tests with HTTPS
  • QuickProxy if you want to switch quickly on proxy tools (WebScarab)

You can download this on web site https://www.firefox.com

or the new Firefox Developer Edition: https://www.mozilla.org/de/firefox/developer/

A database administration tool

Using a heavy database manging client is more productive than using web tools like phpmyadmin. For such a client, you can try

• SquirrelSQL
• DBeaver

Go on official web site of this product to download them.

An IDE and plugins

You must then have a development IDE that support PHP, for example Eclipse PHP, PHPStorm or VSCode.

Eclipse

Install Eclipse

We recommend to use an Eclipse version provided on eclipse.org. For example: https://eclipse.org/pdt/

Also any version available on Eclipse web site is possible.

Once Eclipse is installed, it is recommanded to setup the following parameters:

• Window - Preferences - General - Workspace - Text file encoding -> UTF8
• Window - Preferences - General - Workspace - New text file line delimiter -> Unix
• Window - Preferences - General - Compare/Patch - Ignore white spaces -> Yes
• Window - Preferences - General - Editor - Text editors - Tab delimiter length -> 4
• Window - Preferences - General - Editor - Text editors - Insert spaces for tab -> No
• Window - Preferences - General - Editor - File Association -> Add *.lang associated to "Text Editor"
• Note: You can also disable Windows - Preferences - Java - Editor - Content Assist - Auto Activation

And if PDT is installed (see later):

• Window - Preferences - PHP - Code Style - Formatter - Tab policy -> Tab
• Window - Preferences - PHP - Code Style - Formatter - Default indentation for wrapped line -> 1
• Window - Preferences - PHP - Code Style - Formatter - Default indentation for array initializer -> 0
• Window - Preferences - PHP - Editor - Typing - Uncheck "When Pasting Adjust Indentation" (keeping this option checked create corruption of text files by adding bad end of line characters)
• Window - Preferences - PHP - Code Style - Formatter - Use the profile provided into dev/setup/eclipse/PSR-12 [built-in].xml as Eclipse syntax formatter.
• Note: You can also disable Windows - Preferences - PHP - Editor - Content Assist - Auto Activation

Install plugin Eclipse for PHP: PDT.

If you installed Eclipse version and PDT is not included, all you have to do is using process Help -> Install new software -> Add -> Archive to add module:

https://download.eclipse.org/releases/xxx - xxx = version

Or from the GUI of any Eclipse =>Install New Software =>Work With Kepler => Wait until list display =>General Purpose Tools Check PHP development tools (PDT)=>Install

Once installed, you must also setup PDT into Eclipse as explained into chapter Environment_and_development_tools_-_Optionnal_components#From_Eclipse

Setup Eclipse to get sources

Once Eclipse is installed, you can connect to GIT repository to get last development version.

For this see page FAQ Get,update GIT project sources.

Codium

Codium is the Free version of VSCode, so the following documentation will probably be compatible with vscode too.

Here is the list of recommended add-ons:

• PHP Intelephense
• phpdoc-comment
• PHPUnit
• PHP CS Fixer

If you develop add-ons for Dolibarr, you will appreciate having the definitions of functions and other objects of dolibarr without having to source the complete tree of dolibarr...

All this is done by retrieving the stubs from https://packagist.org/packages/caprel/dolibarr-stubs.

Once the stub is downloaded / or installed following the doc, remember to add the dolibarr-stubs file to the list of stubs of your codium, edit the file ~/.config/VSCodium/User/settings.json

"intelephense.stubs": [
  "apache",
  "intl",
  "standard",
  "/media/erics/stockage/tmp/dolibarr/stubs",
 ],
 "intelephense.environment.includePaths": [
  "/media/erics/stockage/tmp/dolibarr/stubs",
 ],

Visual Studio Code (VSCode)

If you choosed VSCode, you can should the following plugin:

• PHP Intelephense
• Git Graph
• EditorConfig so VSCode will automatically use the setup of the project defined into .editorconfig

Git Hooks

Install Pre-commit githook

You can use git hooks to check the syntax of the file you commit and cancel (or better autofix) the commit if something is wrong.

Instruction to install such a precommit hook is available on this file:

https://github.com/Dolibarr/dolibarr/tree/develop/dev/setup/pre-commit

Such hooks will work when using git on command line but may also work when committing using your common IDE (it has been validated with Eclipse and VSC).

Once installed, the hook will start on your next commit to re-format your code, so your code will always match the coding syntax rules. If everybody enable this hook, everybody will use the same coding syntax rule, so it is highly recommended to enable it if you can. If something is wrong in the syntax, the commit will be immediately canceled. If it can be fixed automatically, phpcbf, installed during the install of the precommit hook, will fix it so you just have to try the commit a second time to have it validated.

Optional

There are a lot of more components you can install to get more technologies support: Environment and development tools - Optionnal components