WordPress, VS Code, Code Sniffers and Coding standards: The Right Way

Every now and then I make a change in my development environment and.. I am back at re-configuring the whole setup.

Let’s get that over with once and for all.

The setup that works

This is my environment:

Visual Studio Code with
- PHP Sniffer by wongjn
Composer with
- squizlabs/php_codesniffer
- wp-coding-standards/wpcs

The root of my workspace contains a phpcs.xml that looks as follows:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ruleset name="mklasen-project">
    <description>PHPCS</description>
    <config name="installed_paths" value="app/www/vendor/wp-coding-standards/wpcs" />
    <config name="ignore_warnings_on_exit" value="1" />
    <rule ref="WordPress"/>
    <file>.</file>
    <exclude-pattern>*/app/www/vendor/*</exclude-pattern>
    <exclude-pattern>*/app/frontend/node_modules/*</exclude-pattern>
</ruleset>

And a composer.json file that sets the vendor dir to app/www/vendor, as follows:

"config": {
 "vendor-dir": "app/www/vendor"
}

Make sure you’re Workspace and General settings are empty!

Check .vscode/settings.json in your workspace and clear it
Hit CMD (cntrl) + shift + P and enter ‘settings.json’ and check your custom settings to see if any PHPSniffer settings are active, clear them out if necessary

That’s it! That should do the job!