Using PHPStan to Extract Data About Your Codebase

PHPStan is known for finding bugs in your code. But that’s not all it can do. When PHPStan analyses your codebase, it builds a detailed model of every class, method, property, type, and relationship. All of that knowledge is accessible through Scope and Reflection. It’d be a shame to only use it for error reporting.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to use PHPStan as a data extraction tool — to query your codebase and produce machine-readable output you can use for documentation, visualization, or any other purpose.