Simplify and document running phpcs locally

[nylen]

This PR makes it easier to run phpcs locally.

To test

• Make sure the Travis build, especially the phpcs step, still passes.
• Install phpcs following the instructions in the comments of bin/run-phpcs.sh. Run the script and verify that it works (no output, exit code 0).

[westonruter]

FYI: If phpcs.ruleset.xml is renamed to phpcs.xml.dist or phpcs.xml then you don't have to supply --standard at all. I suggest that this could eliminate the need for bin/run-phpcs.sh entirely. See https://github.com/WordPress-Coding-Standards/WordPress-Coding-Standards#using-a-custom-ruleset

Additionally, the ruleset file can be configured to exclude the node_modules and vendor directories, eliminating the need for using find and xargs.

[westonruter]

The ruleset just needs to include these lines:

<exclude-pattern>*/node_modules/*</exclude-pattern>
<exclude-pattern>*/vendor/*</exclude-pattern>

[nylen]

Nice! I'll try this out, and then move the setup documentation to a better place.

One more question: is it possible to enable the -s option via the config as well? I find it much easier to parse the output this way.

[nylen]

It turns out we need to whitelist directories and files using the <file> tag instead.

With the suggested exclude entries in place, running phpcs -s . is extremely, extremely slow (2 minutes and counting before I killed it). strace reveals that phpcs still recurses into all directories, ignoring the exclude entries. This is a known issue, fixed in the 3.x releases, which we can't use yet: squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer#1113

is it possible to enable the -s option via the config as well

From looking through the code, the answer to this is no.

[westonruter]

From looking at https://github.com/squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer/wiki/Annotated-ruleset.xml I just found that you can indeed do this! See 7f0fff5.

Now all you need to do to run PHPCS is just do phpcs without any args at all.

[ntwb]

Looks good to me 👍

edit: Ha, I should have refreshed the page first, I would have seen the above ^^^ 😉

[westonruter]

We can now remove -s from the instructions since it is defined as a default arg in phpcs.xml

[westonruter]

Per below, the -s can now be removed since it is the default.

[westonruter]

I wonder if it would be easier to make phpcs 2.9.x a Composer dependency instead? If we add a composer.json which has wp-coding-standards/wpcs among its dev-requirements then all a contributor (and Travis CI alike) would need to do is composer install and then do ./vendor/bin/phpcs.

[nylen]

I tried this out, and am getting the following error:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'PHP_CodeSniffer_Exception' with message 'Referenced sniff "WordPress-Core" does not exist'

Is it expected that we need to call vendor/bin/phpcs --config-set?

[westonruter]

@nylen yes, that's right.

[nylen]

I'll merge this and explore using composer in a separate PR.