Laravel Pint – A Minimalist Code Style Fixer for PHP

Laravel Pint – A Minimalist Code Style Fixer for PHP

Digitization has led to the implementation of numerous web applications for making different types of processes easier and faster. Various open-source frameworks are easily available that an organization can implement for developing web applications.

Understanding the basics of coding is essential for designing a web application. Many frameworks have defined components that make this process of web application design easier and more user-friendly.

What is Laravel Pint?

Laravel Pint is a robust, easy-to-understand, open-source PHP framework for web application design. It includes the model-view-controller design pattern that enables reusing the existing components from the different frameworks for creating the web application. The designed web application is thus more structured and pragmatic.

Laravel Pint includes a rich set of functionalities that helps in boosting the speed of web development. Additional knowledge about core and advanced PHP makes the task of web development easier and time-saving. This implements security and prevents several web attacks.

Key Points of Laravel Pint

  • It is a web app framework that comes with expressive and elegant syntax.

  • Developers can feel more creative while working with Laravel Pint.

  • Laravel Pint eases developers’ pain points in caching, routing, sessions and authentication.

  • Without compensating for the functionality of the application, Laravel Pint makes the development process much easier.

  • Laravel is simple and highly accessible, yet it is a powerful tool used to create robust applications.

Features of Laravel Pint:

The Laravel Pint is gaining importance as an ideal choice for designing applications due to its different features that include:

  • Modularity: Laravel includes 20 built-in libraries and modules that help in enhancing the application. Each of these modules is integrated with the composer dependency manager for easy updates.

  • Testability: This feature helps in testing the application through various test cases. This helps the application in maintaining the code based on the requirement.

  • Routing: Laravel implements the use of a flexible approach and allows the users to define the routes for a web application. This routing is essential as it allows for scaling the application in a better way along with increased performance.

  • Configuration Management: Laravel allows web application designing that can run efficiently on different configurations by allowing constant changes in the configuration. It uses a consistent approach for handling these configuration changes efficiently.

  • Query Builder and ORM: It incorporates a query builder that allows for building the querying database with help of simple chain methods. It provides the object relationship mapper and is eloquent for active record implementation.

  • Schema Builder: This feature helps in maintaining the database definition and schemas in PHP code format. It allows for maintaining track of all the changes done for the database migrations.

  • A template Engine: It implements the use of a Blade template engine that uses the lightweight template language and is useful in designing hierarchical blocks and layouts with the help of predefined blocks with dynamic content.

Getting started with Laravel Pint:

Several steps need to be followed while starting with the Laravel Pint. There are some recommendations for the users for ease of understanding before using Laravel. The concise and clear document will help in better understanding and it includes:

  • Installation and configuration: The installation step includes the installation of different utilities essential like composer that allows for managing the dependencies. Next include the installation of Laravel which can be done via Laravel installer, Composer, create-project, or via download. It is important to check for the essential system requirements that include the PHP greater than 5.4 and MCrypt PHP extension. This is followed by the configuration of the local environment that helps in making the secured data encryption. It is important to set the right permissions and paths for the directories.

  • Routing: It is important to consider the basic routing, route parameters, filters, named routes, route groups, sub-domain routing, route prefixing, route model binding, throwing 404 errors, routing to controllers, etc.

  • Requests and Inputs: It allows for accessing all the request inputs by the users. The cookies created by the Laravel framework are encrypted with authentication code and will remain invalid if changed by the clients.

  • Views and Responses: Views help in separating the controller and the domain logic from the presentation logic. It allows the easy viewing of the code for composers, special responses, and response macros.

  • Controllers: It is important to understand the different types of controllers including the basic controllers, filters, implicit controllers, RESTful resource controllers, etc.

The details in these documents give a good grasp on understanding the basics and designing of web applications. Laravel helps in developing the application by easing the common tasks like authentication, sessions, routing, caching, etc.

The Laravel Pint is an accessible and powerful tool useful for large robust applications. It has improved features of control container, expressive migration, tight integration unit testing support, etc.

Benefits of Using Laravel Pint:

  • Authorization: Implementing authentication is very simple with the presence of Laravel. It offers the simplest way to organize the authorization logic and resource control access.

  • Speed: Laravel is empowered by familiar cache backends like Memcached. And it is specifically designed to make use of the file cache driver, and in-memory cache. It even supports configuring multiple cache systems.

  • Security: Laravel secures the web file system from the risk of SQL Injection, cross-site scripting and so.

  • Automation: Laravel comes with a built-in PHPUnit and PHPUnit.xml file that offers excellent support for application testing. In addition, the framework offers convenient helper methods and stimulates users' basic behavior to conduct expressive testing.

  • URL Route Configuration: Laravel comes with a pre-defined Http/routes.php file which accepts URL and closure easily. Because of that, defining URL routes would be very simple and expressive.

  • Scheduling Tasks: The presence of a command scheduler in Laravel allows developers to define scheduling commands easily by using a single Cron entry.

  • Queue System: The framework offers a unified API in queue backends, because of that it easily identifies and queues the time-consuming tasks. This set of operations increases site loading and functional speed dramatically.

Here’s the Reason Why Laravel Considered As An Opinionated PHP Code Style Fixer for Minimalists

The different reasons for considering the opinionated PHP code-style fixer for minimalists include:

1. Installation:

The Laravel Pint requires PHP higher than 8.0. Users can use the composer require laravel/pint --dev for installing it, once the Pint is installed, it makes the pint binary ./vendor/bin/pint available in the project vendor director.

2. Running Pint:

While running Pint, it generates a list of output files that are fixed. The user can see the changes in detail by using -v option ./vendor/bin/pint -v

It also allows for the inspection of the code for style errors without changing the files by using --test option /vendor/bin/pint --test

3. Configuring Pint:

Pint by default does not require any configuration and allows for fixing the code style issues in the code by following the opinionated coding style. It also allows for customizing the pre-sets, rules, inspection folder, etc. by making the changes in the project root directory by using pint.json

{
    "preset": "laravel"
}

The user can also specify the directory for configuration by using --config option pint --config vendor/my-company/coding-style/pint.json

4. Presets:

Presets are the set of rules used for fixing code style issues in the code.

Pint uses the Laravel preset by default and allows fixing issues by following the opinionated coding style of Laravel. The user can use a different preset by changing the setting either to --present

pint --preset psr12

Or you can change the setting to ‘pint.json’.

{
    "preset": "psr12"
}

Meanwhile, the different presets supported include Laravel, psr12,, and Symfony.

5. Rules:

It includes the rules that are style guidelines used for fixing the code style issues in the code. The presets are predefined groups of rules that are perfect for most PHP projects. Thus, no change is needed in these rules. If the user needs to change the rules, they can enable or disable specific rules in pint.json

{
    "preset": "laravel",
    "rules": {
        "simplified_null_return": true,
        "braces": false,
        "new_with_braces": {
            "anonymous_class": false,
            "named_class": false
        }
    }
}

As Pint is built on PHP-CS-Fixer, the user can use any of its rules for fixing the code style issues in the project.

6. Exclude Folders or files:

Pint will inspect all the files in the vendor folder. If the user wishes to exclude more folders, it can be done by using the exclude configuration option.

{
    "exclude": [
        "my-specific/folder"
    ]
}

Similarly, if you want to exclude a file, you can make use of the notName config option.

{
    "notName": [
        "*-my-file.php"
    ]
}

Also, if you want to exclude a specific file present in a particular path means you can make use of the notPath config option.

{
    "notPath": [
        "path/to/excluded-file.php"
    ]
}

Bottom Line:

Implementing the Laravel Pint for web application designing is very useful for different types of organizations as it is easy to handle, user-friendly, and includes various templates and modules that allow for designing of the application based on the requirements. It also includes the added features that allow increased security of the web application, thus decreasing web attacks.