WP-OOP - Plugin Boilerplate

A boilerplate for starting WordPress plugins quickly.

Details

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

Features

• 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.

• Build Script - Use a single GNU Make entrypoint to build the plugin, including modules, in place; or, build a dist version without affecting current working directory.

Usage

Getting Started

1. Use this template

   This GitHub repository is a template. Use it to create a project of your own from.

   Of course, you can always clone and push it elsewhere manually, or use another method of forking, if more appropriate.

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. You may want to add plugins here to get related IDE features; see Adding Plugins for more information on this subject.

   • Module composer.json: This bootstrap uses the awesome composer-merge-plugin to keep module dependencies 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. One such module, the demo module of the plugin, is already included in the package. This is there only for demonstration purposes, and can be renamed and re-written, or entirely removed. Either way, see Adding Modules for more information on how to configure which modules the application will use.

     Important: Adding modules to other modules as dependencies is considered bad practice. Modules don't interact with each other directly, but use an approach similar to DDD but applied to service definitions to ensure that they are as isolated as possible. Instead, have the app (project's main package) depend on other modules, and wire them together in the app's main module. One legit reason for a module to depend on another module is if that other module isn't necessarily loaded as a module, but its symbols are needed somewhere. However, in this case it's important to avoid thinking of it as a module until it is added as the app's dependency, and to think of it as simply a library.

3. Build everything

   1. Build the environment.

      In order to develop, build, and test the plugin, certain things are required first. These include: the database, WordPress core, PHP, Composer, and web server. The project ships with all of this pre-configured, and the Docker services must first be built:

      docker compose build
      

   2. Build the plugin in place.

      In order for the project source files to have the desired effect, they first must be built into their runtime version. This may include: installing dependencies, transpilation, copying or archiving files, whatever the modules require to have desired effect, etc. At the same time, a single entrypoint to various tasks performed as part of the project build or QA allows for more centralized and automated control over the project.

      For this reason, the Makefile is shipped with the project, declaring commands for commonly run tasks, including build. Run the following command to build the plugin, including modules, in the plugin source directory: this makes it possible to preview and test changes instantly after they are made.

      docker compose run --rm build make build
      

      Note: This step includes installation of declared dependencies. See Updating Dependencies for more info on this subject.

4. 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".

5. Release

   When you would like to release the current working directory as an installable plugin archive, the shipped build script needs to perform a few transformations (like optimize prod dependencies), and archive the package in a specific way. The following command will result in an archive with name similar to plugin-0.1.1-beta21+2023-08-12-12-37-22_105188ec9180.zip being added to build/release:

    docker compose run --rm build make release RELEASE_VERSION=0.1.1-beta21

   As you can see, the resulting archive's name will reflect the time and commit hash as SemVer metadata, aside from the version itself. If RELEASE_VERSION is omitted, dev is used by default to indicate that this is not a tagged milestone, but work in progress.

   Note: If the current working directory contains any edits registerable by Git (disregarding any .gitignore rules), the commit hash will reflect a point in history of the files in build/dist, rather than of project history. To ensure that a concrete version is being released, clean the directory tree entirely. The best way to do that is probably to create a fresh clone.

Updating Dependencies

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.

Note: If PHPStorm does not automatically assign a PHP interpreter for Composer, set it to use the "Build" interpreter. All build tasks, including dep installation, must be run inside the build service, which corresponds to that interpreter.

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.

Adding Modules

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 src/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. For this reason, in projects using this bootstrap you may sometimes find an 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.

External Modules

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

Local Modules

To add a local module, add the module to the modules 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.

Adding Plugins

If your plugin depends on or can integrate with other plugins, you may want to add them to the environment. In order to get IDE features such as auto-suggest for other plugin code, you may want to add them to your require-dev.

In order to have the test WordPress website to have another plugin installed and active, add an appropriate WP-CLI command to the docker/wp-entrypoint.sh script. Example:

wp plugin install bbpress --version=2.6.9 --activate --allow-root --path="${DOCROOT_PATH}"

Please note:

• The --allow-root flag is required, because this will be run by Docker as the superuser.
• The --path option is also required, and must be set to $DOCROOT_PATH, to make sure that all tools work on the same path. You may also use other variables from .env in this file, as long as they are configured to be passed into the service by docker-compose.yml.
• The --activate flag activates the plugin after it's installed.

QA

Run all QA tools at once by using the qa target in the included Makefile. All QA is done in the test service.

docker compose run --rm test make qa

Testing Code

Run all tests at once using the test target:

docker compose run --rm test make test

• PHPUnit

  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 test make test-php

  • Will also be run automatically on CI.
  • PHPStorm integration included.

Static Analysis

Run all static analysis tools at once by using the scan target:

docker compose run --rm test make scan

• Psalm

  Run Psalm in project root:

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

  • Will also be run automatically on CI.
  • PHPStorm integration included.

• 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.
  • PHPStorm integration included.

Debugging

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 something 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.

Database UI

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

Alternatively, you are welcome to install and configure a phpMyAdmin service or similar.