We’re excited to announce the release of PHP Tools for Visual Studio Code version 1.59! This update delivers a wide range of improvements and new features — from enhanced Laravel support, powerful code actions, and improved IntelliSense, to diagnostics and formatting refinements.
Let’s take a look at what’s new:
We’re excited to announce the release of Update 1.58 for our Visual Studio Code extension. This update comes on the heels of a major internal change in our technology stack and brings a suite of new features, improvements, and foundational enhancements for future development.
PHP Extension works seamlessly with Cursor—the popular AI-powered code editor. With the PHP extension, you get a full suite of features, including code completion, intelligent code actions, an integrated debugger, advanced syntax highlighting, and effortless navigation. But that’s not all! It also offers workspace-wide code analysis and detailed diagnostics. Plus, these features are fully compatible with the AI chat agent, creating a powerful coding experience.
Performance always matters. Your Laravel application might be beautifully designed and written, but there's always the possibility of hidden bottlenecks. Is it unnecessarily slow? Can it be optimized further? Sometimes, a single function can consume most of your CPU time. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to profile your Laravel application in Visual Studio Code to uncover and address these issues.
.env Files in PHP: Concepts, Tools, and Best Practices
Environment variables are a crucial part of managing configuration in modern web applications. .env files are an elegant way to handle these variables, ensuring configuration remains separate from your codebase. In this article, we will explore the key concepts, tools, and best practices for working with .env files in PHP, including the use of libraries like phpdotenv and debugging techniques in Visual Studio Code.
In a previous blog post, we introduced the initial Blade editor support for Visual Studio Code. This support brought a seamless integration of PHP editor language features into Blade files. Users could enjoy enhanced productivity with features such as mouse tooltips, PHP code completion, inlay hints, refactorings, code actions, and intuitive navigation within their Blade templates. These features significantly improved the development experience for Laravel applications.
The PHP editor with PHP Tools extension provides vast array of useful code actions - either code fixes or inline code refactorings. What if you always prefer the fix or the specific refactor (like simplifying ?: operator or removing unnecessary ?> tag whenever possible).
Maintaining a consistent code style is essential for any development team—not just for aesthetics but for readability and maintainability. Developers often use various IDEs, making it challenging to ensure that code adheres to the same standards. Thankfully, .editorconfig provides a unified way to enforce coding conventions across different development environments, including Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code and PhpStorm. In this post, we’ll explore how teams can utilize .editorconfig to keep their PHP code consistent and how to bridge the gap between different IDEs with ease.
The PHP extension for Visual Studio Code comes with an exhaustive code formatting built-in (see docs). There is a vast array of parameters to configure your custom code style, predefined code styles for common standards, and all of this with ability to only format selection, format-on-type, format-on-save, and newly - format multiple PHP files at once, with preview.
Blade template language is an important part of Laravel development. It combines XML/HTML, Blade Statements, and PHP language! This blog post is not about Blade development itself, but rather what we (as the authors of PHP extension for VS Code) can provide you to make the development easier.