Setup WordPress Coding Standards (WPCS) on Mac

by | May 24, 2021

The Windows version of this article is here.

In this article, we explain how to have your WordPress development setup in Visual Code Code on Mac OS. We will cover:

  • phpcs installation on mac
  • PHP Sniffer setup on Visual Studio Code

Install PHPCS using Homebrew

In the terminal window on mac, run the following

brew doctor
brew install php-code-sniffer

This will have phpcs install. Run to check the status by:

phpcs -i

You should see something like this

The installed coding standards are MySource, PEAR, PSR1, PSR12, PSR2, Squiz, Zend

Install the WordPress Coding Standard

Use the git clone command to download the source code from GitHub. The last parameter indicates where you want to put the source code, we are using ~/codes/wpcs here.

We will be under develop branch by default. Make sure you have switched it to the master branch to have a stable build.

git clone https://github.com/WordPress-Coding-Standards/WordPress-Coding-Standards.git ~/codes/wpcs

cd ~/codes/wpcs
git checkout master

After that is downloaded, add the coding standard to the phpcs’ config.

phpcs --config-set installed_paths ~/codes/wpcs

Now you should see WordPress standard is added when you do `phpcs-i`

The installed coding standards are MySource, PEAR, PSR1, PSR12, PSR2, Squiz, Zend, WordPress, WordPress-Extra, WordPress-Docs and WordPress-Core

Add this to the composer

composer global require "squizlabs/php_codesniffer=*"

You can now execute it using below command:

phpcs --standard=WordPress --extensions=php ~/codes/phpfolder

Auto Fixer: phpcbf

phpcs can show you where the error is. phpcbf (PHP Code Beautifuler and Fixer) will try to fit the error for you. This tool is come with phpcs. Just simply run this:

phpcbf --standard=WordPress --extensions=php ~/codes/phpfolder

Next Step

Now we are doing with setting up PHPCS and WPCS on Windows. See this article about making the WPCS auto fix automated on Visual Studio Code.