phpcognit

See which PHP functions are hard to read, while you're reading them.

Marks functions whose cognitive complexity is too high, as you open and save files. No PHP runtime, no Composer entry, nothing added to your project — the analyser is a Rust binary that ships with the extension.

Why cognitive complexity

It measures how hard code is to read, where cyclomatic complexity measures how hard it is to test. A switch with twenty arms is cyclomatically awful and cognitively fine; three nested ifs are the reverse. The metric is SonarSource's.

What you get

• Instant. The analyser scans 600,000 lines in 1.5 seconds, so a single file is imperceptible.
• Quiet on legacy code. If your repo has a .phpcognit-baseline.json, everything recorded in it stays hidden. You see new complexity, not the decade you inherited.
• Honest about suppressions. A // phpcognit-ignore: reason comment hides a finding — but only with a reason attached.
• Agrees with your pipeline. The editor shows exactly what CI would fail on, so the two never contradict each other.
• Never runs your code. Analysis is syntax-only: no autoloader, no reflection.

Settings

The threshold matches SonarSource's own default. Lower it for stricter review, raise it while you dig out of a legacy codebase.

Requirements

None. The binary ships with the extension and is fetched for your platform on first use — macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Linux (x86-64 and arm64), Windows (x86-64).

If you already have phpcognit installed via Homebrew or npm, point phpcognit.path at it and the extension will use your version instead.

Adopting on an existing codebase

Any codebase that predates the tool has violations. Rather than being told to fix them all, record them once and see only what's new:

phpcognit --write-baseline src/

Commit the resulting .phpcognit-baseline.json. From then on the editor stays quiet about the old code and speaks up about the new — and so does CI.

Links

Repository and CLI documentation · Report an issue · MIT licensed