A boilerplate for starting WordPress plugins quickly.

Use this project as a starter for your modular WordPress plugin!

• Docker - Develop and test your plugin with Docker. Use an environment tailored for your plugin. See changes instantly in the browser. Build a Docker image containing a complete WordPress installation with your plugin and all pre-requisites.

• PHPStorm - Configuration for integrations of arguably the best PHP IDE out there, including:

  • Database client - View and manipulate the database from PHPStorm.
  • Composer - Install and manage PHP dependencies on the correct version of PHP without leaving the IDE.
  • PHPUnit - Run tests and get reports directly in PHPStorm.
  • xDebug - Set breakpoints and inspect your code in PHPStorm.
  • Code coverage - See what has not been tested yet in a friendly GUI.

• Static Code Analysis - Maintain a consistent coding style, and catch problems early.

  • Psalm - Inspects your code for problems.
  • PHPCS - Checks your code style. PHPCBF can fix some of them automatically.

• Continuous Integration - Automatically verify that all contributions comply with project standards with GitHub Actions.

• Modularity - Keep concerns separated into modules, which can be freely moved out of the package at any time thanks to the composer-merge-plugin.

Use Composer to bootstrap your project.

1. Clone and install deps:

   composer create-project wp-oop/plugin-boilerplate my_plugin --stability=dev

   Here, my_plugin is the name of the project folder. Should correspond to the slug of your plugin.

2. Customize project

   Note: Asterisk * below denotes that changing this value requires rebuild of the images in order to have effect on the dev environment.

   • Copy .env.example to .env.

   • .env:

     • PLUGIN_NAME - The slug of your plugin. Must correspond to the name of the plugin folder.
     • BASE_PATH - If you are using Docker Machine, i.e. on any non-Linux system, set this to the absolute path to the project folder inside the machine. If you are on Linux, you do not need to change this.
     • PROJECT_MOUNT_PATH - The path to mount the project folder into. This should be the absolute path to the folder of your plugin inside the container.
     • PROJECT_NAME - Slug of your project. Used mainly for naming containers with container_name. This is helpful to run multiple projects on the same machine.
     • PHP_BUILD_VERSION - The version of PHP, on which the plugin will be built. This should correspond to the minimal PHP requirement of your plugin. Used to determine the tag of the php image.
     • PHP_TEST_VERSION* - The version of PHP, on which the plugin will be run. This should correspond to the maximal PHP requirement of your plugin. Used to determine the tag of the wordpress image.
     • WORDPRESS_VERSION* - The version of WordPress, on which the plugin will be run. Used to determine the tag of the wordpress image.
     • DB_USER_PASSWORD* - This and other DB_* variables are used to determine the password to the WordPress database. Change these if you want to secure your deployed application.
     • WP_DOMAIN* - The domain name of the WordPress application, which contains your plugin. Among other things, used to set up the local dev image. Corresponds to the alias used in the hosts file, if local. This value is also used in the PHPStorm's DB integration. If this value is changed, PHPStorm's configuration must be updated.
     • WP_TITLE* - The title of the WordPress application, which contains your plugin. No quotes, because Docker does not expand variables in this file. It is used during automatic installation of WordPress inside the local dev image. This value is also used in the PHPStorm's DB integration. If this value is changed, PHPStorm's configuration must be updated.
     • ADMIN_USER* - This and other ADMIN_* variables are used to determine WordPress admin details during automatic WordPress installation with WP-CLI.

   • composer.json:

     • name - Name of your package.

     • description - Description of your package.

     • authors - You and/or your company details.

     • require - Your project's package and platform requirements. You may want to change the PHP version if your minimal requirement is different. Don't forget to update PHP_BUILD_VERSION in .env.

     • require-dev - Your project's development requirements. Apart from tools for testing, this should (for now) contain any WordPress plugins that your plugin depends on, and WordPress. If you add plugins here, you need to mount them as volumes in docker-compose.yml, the wp_dev service. The source is the absolute path to the vendor dir. The destination is an absolute path to the plugin folder in the plugins directory of WordPress; you can use absolute paths, or the DOCROOT_PATH or PROJECT_MOUNT_PATH from the .env file to help make the paths more versatile. If you want these plugins to be active when the container is brought up, you need to also add these instructions to the docker/wp-entrypoint.sh script. You may use WP CLI for this. These instructions should go right below the line that says # Custom setup instructions. This way, they will only run when WordPress is ready for action. All changes to the entrypoint script require image rebuild: use docker-compose down and docker-compose build. This is because these changes affect the application image, which the entrypoint script is baked into.

       In the future, this may need to go into require, if a plugin build script takes care of removing unnecessary plugins from vendor folder. This may be a good idea because the plugin does actually require other plugins, but they should not be shipped with the plugin. Otherwise, completely Composer-managed WordPress installations will not automatically install other required plugins.

   • Module composer.json: This bootstrap uses the awesome composer-merge-plugin to keep module depedencies together with modules. This allows keeping track of which dependencies belong to which modules, detect dependency incompatibilities, and moving modules out of the package into packages of their own when necessary.

     Modules can be installed from other packages, or included in the package. In the latter case, they should be added to the directory modules.local. One such module, the core module of the plugin, is already included in the package. Its composer.json should also be personalized, just like the composer.json of this package.

3. Spin up the dev environment

   Run the following command in the terminal. If you use Docker Machine, you will need to start it and configure your environment first with docker-machine start and docker-machine env.

   docker-compose up wp_dev 

   This will bring up only the dev environment and its dependencies, which right now is the database. The database is a separate service, because in a deployed environment you may choose to use a different DB server.

   After this, add an entry to your local hosts file. The host should correspond to the value of WP_DOMAIN from the .env file. The IP would be Docker machine's IP address. On Linux, this is the same as your machine's IP address on the local network, and usually 127.0.0.1 (localhost) works. If you are using Docker Machine (in a non-Linux environment), use docker-machine ip to find it.

   Now you should be able to visit that domain, and see the website. The admin username and password are both admin by default, and are determined by the ADMIN_USER and ADMIN_PASS variables from the .env file. Your plugin should already be installed and active, and no other plugins should be installed. If this is not the case, inspect the output you got from docker-compose up.

   If you use PHPStorm integrations that involve Docker, such as Composer, you maybe receive the error "Docker account not found". This is because, for some reason, PHPStorm requires the same name of the Docker deployment configuration to be used in all projects, and there currently does not seem to be a way to commit that to the VCS. Because of this, you are required to create a Docker deployment yourself. Simply go to Project Settings > Docker and create a configuration named precisely "Docker Machine".

Composer is installed into the build service's image. To run composer commands, use docker-compose run. For example, to update dependencies you can run the following:

docker-compose run --rm build composer update

If you use PHPStorm, you can use the composer integration, as the project is already configured for this.

Currently, it is not possible to use PHPStorm's composer integration because managing local modules with the composer-merge-plugin require running composer update --lock instead of simply composer update. This is currently unsupported by PHPStorm, but a feature request has been submitted.

Do not run composer update for the modules' composer.json file! All Composer operations must be performed on the root package's composer.json file.

Any changes to the project folder are immediately reflected in the dev environment, and this includes the vendor folder and composer.lock file. This is because the project's folder is mounted into the correct place in the WordPress container.

This boilerplate promotes modularity, and supports Dhii modules out of the box. Any such module that exposes a ModuleInterface implementation can be loaded, allowing it to run in the application, and making its services available.

The list of modules returned by inc/modules.php is the authoritative source of modules in the application. Because it is PHP code, modules can be loaded in any required way, including:

• Simple instantiation of a module class that will be autoloaded.

  If your module class is on one of the autoload paths registered with e.g. Composer, you can just instantiate it as you would any other class. This is a very quick and simple way to load some modules.

• Usage of a factory class or file.

  In order to make modules de-coupled from the application, but to still be able to provide dependencies from the application to the module, it is sometimes desirable to use a "padding" between the application and the module's initialization. In this project, as well as in some others, we use a module.php file. This file returns a function which, given some parameters like the root project path, will return a ModuleInterface instance. Another approach could be to use a named constructor, or even a dedicated factory class.

• Scanning certain paths.

  If modules do not conflict in any way, the module load order may be irrelevant. In this case, it is possible to auto-discover modules by, for example, scanning certain folders for some entrypoints or config files. Implement whatever auto-discovery mechanism you wish, as long as the module instances end up in the authoritative list.

To add a module from another package, require that package with Composer and add the ModuleInterface instance to the list.

To add a local module, add the module to the modules.local folder, and do the same as for any other module. Local modules may also declare their own dependencies by adding a composer.json file to their root folder. These files will be picked up by Composer when updating dependencies in the project root, thanks to the composer-merge-plugin, provided that composer update --lock is run before composer update. This is a great way to separate module dependencies from other dependencies. Consult that Composer plugin's documentation for more information.

This bootstrap includes PHPUnit. It is already configured, and you can test that it's working by running the sample tests:

docker-compose run --rm build vendor/bin/phpunit

If you use PHPStorm, you can use its PHPUnit integration: right-click on any test or folder inside the tests directory, and choose "Run". This will do the same as the above command. Because the build service is used for tests, they will be run with its PHP version, which should correspond to your project's minimal requirements.

The bootstrap includes xDebug in the test service of the Docker environment, and PHPStorm configuration. To use it, right click on any test or folder within the tests directory, and choose "Debug". This will run the tests with xDebug enabled. If you receive the error about xdebug.remote_host being set incorrectly and suggesting to fix the error, fix it by setting that variable to your machine's IP address on the local network in the window that pops up. After this, breakpoints in any code reachable by PHPUnit tests, including the code of tests themselves, will cause execution to pause, allowing inspection of code.

If you change the PHP version of the test service, the debugger will stop working. This is because different PHP versions use different versions of xDebug, and because the path to the xDebug extension depends on its version, that path will also change, invalidating the currently configured path. To fix this, the "Debugger extension" fields in the interpreter settings screen needs to be updated. You can run docker-compose run test ls -lah /usr/local/lib/php/extensions to see the list of extensions. One of them should say someting like no-debug-non-zts-20170718. Change the corresponding part of the "Debugger extension" path value to that string.

At this time, inspection of code that runs during a web request is not available.

This bootstrap includes phpMyAdmin, which provides a GUI for your database. To start working with it, you must first bring up the related container, as it is not brought up together with the dev environment:

docker-compose up db_admin

You can now head over to the application's domain, defined usually by the WP_DOMAIN value from the .env file, but access it on port 1234, e.g. http://plugin.myhost:1234. The username is root, and password is the one specified by the DB_ROOT_PASSWORD variable in the .env file.

This bootstrap comes ready with configuration for PHPStorm's database integration. With it, it's possible to completely avoid bringing up the db_admin service. To use it, its settings must be up to date from the value of DB_USER_PASSWORD. Using it is highly recommended, as it is an integrated DB client, and will provide assistance during coding.

• Psalm

  Run Psalm in project root:

  docker-compose run --rm test vendor/bin/psalm

  Will also be run automatically on CI.

• PHPCS

  Run PHPCS/PHPCBF in project root:

  docker-compose run --rm test vendor/bin/phpcs -s --report-source --runtime-set ignore_warnings_on_exit 1
  docker-compose run --rm test vendor/bin/phpcbf

  By default, uses PSR-12 and some rules from the Slevomat Coding Standard.

  Will also be run automatically on CI.