Essential Plugins for PHPStorm Users

We've curated a collection of essential plugins for PhpStorm that we think you’ll enjoy. From our favorite theme to Laravel-specific tools to supercharge your PHP development and a free AI-powered autocomplete/chat plugin that feels like magic.

Nord Theme

Nord (JetBrains Marketplace) is an arctic, north-bluish, clean, and elegant JetBrains IDE UI and editor color theme. Designed for a fluent and clear workflow based on the Nord color palette.

Nord theme for PhpStorm
The Nord theme for PhpStorm

Laravel Idea

The Laravel Idea plugin is an Efficient Laravel Development Environment for PhpStorm. This premium plugin (~$4.90 USD/mo) adds amazing productivity features to Laravel applications:

  • Autocompletion for routes: Laravel Idea provides intelligent autocompletion for routes, making it faster and easier to work with routes in your Laravel projects.
  • Eloquent models support: Enjoy enhanced support for Eloquent models, including autocompletion, navigation, and code generation, to boost your productivity.
  • Validation rule support: Laravel Idea offers comprehensive autocompletion for validation rules, ensuring accurate and efficient validation code.
  • Advanced code generation: The plugin streamlines your workflow by providing code generation capabilities, helping you write code more quickly and efficiently.
  • Focus on what matters: By automating routine and repetitive tasks, Laravel Idea allows you to concentrate on the work that truly matters, saving you time and effort.
Eloquent autocomplete in action using the Laravel Idea plugin
Eloquent autocomplete in action using the Laravel Idea plugin

Check out laravel-idea.com to get started!

The author of Laravel Idea also created the following plugin we’ll cover, .env files support, which makes working with .env values in your PHP code a breeze.

.env Files Support

The .env files support (JetBrains Marketplace) plugin gives you variable auto-completion, which is very useful when you need to wire up a .env value to a Laravel configuration value. It also supports the following features:

  • Environment variables completion based on .env, Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml files.
  • Go to declaration(in .env file) and usages(in code), by Ctrl(Cmd)+click or hot key(Ctrl(Cmd)-B, etc.)
  • .env file syntax highlighter
.env files support auto-complete
`.env` files support auto-complete

EditorConfig (bundled)

EditorConfig makes coding styles consistent for multiple developers working on the same project across various IDEs and editors. This bundled plugin should be enabled by default, but make sure your project has a .editorconfig file to take advantage of these features. Laravel projects ship with an .editorconfig file, and you can see that through this bundled plugin, you can easily navigate and configure code style for each file type and see what styles extend others at a glance:

Viewing the .editorconfig file in PhpStorm
Viewing the `.editorconfig` file in PhpStorm

Collector - A Collection Plugin

Collector (JetBrains Marketplace) adds support for Laravel collections, including a bunch of useful refactorings for making collections better. It can also convert normal PHP statements like foreach and array_map into collections.

Refactor array_map to collection
Refactor `array_map` to collection

Codeium: AI Autocomplete and Chat

Codeium is a free AI Code Completion and Chat tool that is comparable to GitHub copilot. It offers autocomplete and is available for a number of editors, including PHPStorm. You can grab this plugin for PHPstorm on the JetBrains marketplace.

Codeium autocomplete suggestions
Codeium: AI Autocomplete and Chat

IntelliVue

The IntelliVue (JetBrains Marketplace) plugin for IntelliJ provides analysis, actions, and utilities for Vue Single File Components. This plugin adds additional functionality on top of the standard Vue plugin. Full undo-redo support is enabled, so you are assured that your important code will not get corrupted by unexpected operations. Actions and Intentions are added to create and navigate from references to implementation. When creating a new Vue component option, a dialog is displayed.

I like how I can easily implement the JavaScript needed for variables in the template using the “Create Vue Implementation” action:

Intellivue Create Vue Implementation action
Intellivue Create Vue Implementation action

That’s a wrap on our essential plugins for PhpStorm users. I hope you've found something useful to make your development with PhpStorm better! We can't share every single extension, so let us know your favorite PhpStorm plugin or theme we didn't share!


The post Essential Plugins for PHPStorm Users appeared first on Laravel News.

Join the Laravel Newsletter to get all the latest Laravel articles like this directly in your inbox.

Read more

© 2024 Extly, CB - All rights reserved.