When you upload a plugin to WordPress.org’s repository, it does some pre-flight checks to make sure the code is okay. More than once it’s caught a missing ; for me. But one day it caught this:
PHP error in: myplugin/tags/0.6/aws/Doctrine/Common/Proxy/ProxyGenerator.php: Errors parsing myplugin/tags/0.6/aws/Doctrine/Common/Proxy/ProxyGenerator.php
I stared for a moment, Googled to be sure, and sighed when I figured out that what was happening was my library was a PHP 5.6+ version and that didn’t pass the 5.4 checks.
Regardless of how annoying this is, it’s not too hard to fix. No, I’m not going to tell you how to avoid the scan, nor am I going to talk about the stupidity of the scan. Instead I’d like to tell you how to get around this problem.
It’s so easy, too.
You see, my issue is that I use Composer to build my resource libraries and in my composer.json file, I have this:
"require": {
"aws/aws-sdk-php": "2.7.*",
"doctrine/orm": "*",
"monolog/monolog": "*"
},
And for what it’s worth, this is great. I have it download all my libraries. Then I have it run a script to copy over just what I need to my aws folder and I have Git and SVN ignore the vendor folder. Everyone wins! The problem is that Composer sees that my laptop is running PHP 5.6 and so it installed version
Fix PHP on Your Computer
Since I use Homebrew on my Mac, this is super easy for me.
$ brew unlink php56 $ brew install php54
Then when I re-run composer update it will install what I need.
The problem here, though, is that this is tied to a specific computer, and if a coworker downloads my stuff and plans to fork it, they’re SOL and merges fail and it’s sad times all around. So with that in mind, uninstall 5.4 and go back to 5.6.
If you have a problem with installing 5.6, run it this way:
$ xcode-select --install $ brew unlink php54 $ brew install php56
Fix PHP in Composer
I like this fix better. Put this above your require statement and you’ll force Composer to build based on PHP 5.4:
"config": {
"platform": {
"php": "5.4"
}
},
Now we’re cooking with fire. This works for everyone, it forces Composer to download 5.4 compatible libraries, and my very long transmission worked.
Is This Perfect?
Obviously not. There are going to be cases where your code absolutely has to be the code for PHP 5.5 and up. The latest version of the AWS SDK is v3, for example. But it’s for 5.5 only. I personally don’t feel there’s enough of a buy-in for PHP 5.5 and up yet to make an issue of it. And having no check at all won’t fly.