Backend Development
PHP Tutorial
How To Set Up Visual Studio Code (VS Code) for PHP Development
How To Set Up Visual Studio Code (VS Code) for PHP Development
Dec 20, 2024 am 11:31 AM
Introduction
Visual Studio Code, also known as VS Code, is a free source code editor — or integrated development environment (IDE) — available for all major operating systems.
With a large collection of extensions for many programming languages, VS Code can be customized to serve a wide variety of development needs. In this guide, you’ll learn how to set up Visual Studio Code for working on PHP projects.
Prerequisites
To follow this guide, you’ll need to download and install the appropriate version of Visual Studio Code for your operating system.
The instructions in this guide were validated on an Ubuntu 20.04 desktop computer, but they should work seamlessly in all operating systems that are supported by VS Code. Please note, though, that keyboard shortcut keys may need to be slightly modified for compatibility with MacOS systems.
Step 1 — Installing VS Code PHP Extensions for Extra Support
Right after installation, VS Code already recognizes PHP code and helps with syntax highlighting, basic debugging, and code indentation. These features are suitable for quick edits or when working with individual PHP scripts. Working in larger projects, though, can become difficult without more context around the code and how each file interacts and integrates within the larger project.
There are a number of VS Code extensions that can help speed up your productivity when working on PHP projects. In this guide, we’ll install and set up PHP Intelephense, a popular PHP extension for VS Code that provides several advanced features such as improved code completion, better navigation between components, rich information tooltips on mouse hover, code auto formatting, and real time error reporting based on static code analysis.
Open the extensions tab by clicking on the last icon on the left menu bar, or by pressing CTRL ? SHIFT ? X. This will bring up a sidebar menu with a search box and a list of popular or recommended extensions. Type “php” or “intelephense” to locate the PHP Intelephense extension. Click on the Install button to install and enable the extension.
Once installation is complete, Intelephense’s official documentation recommends that you disable the built-in PHP Language Features extension that comes with VS Code.
To disable this extension, type @builtin php in the Extensions search box to locate the built-in PHP extensions. Then click on the settings icon for the PHP Language Features extension, and click the Disable option in the drop-down menu.
If you have any files open in VS Code, you’ll need to reload the editor to apply the changes.
You can install other extensions by following the same process described for the PHP Intelephense extension, but be aware that some extensions will require additional software to be installed on your system. Check the extension documentation to make sure you have requirements set appropriately.
Step 2 — Importing or Creating a New PHP Project
To import an existing PHP project into VS Code, click on the first icon on the left menu bar or type CTRL ? SHIFT ? E to access the file explorer. Click the Open Folder button and select your project’s directory. In case you are creating a new project, you can create a new folder and select that as your project directory.
The explorer window will now show the project’s directory tree, giving you quick access to files and directories on your project.
Step 3 — Customizing Theme and Editor Font (Optional)
Although not necessary, it is often a good idea to customize the appearance of your editor to make it more comfortable to use in the longer term. As a developer you may spend several hours every day looking at an IDE such as VS Code, and for that reason it’s important to make sure the editor font has an appropriate size, and the contrast is enough for good readability without tiring your eyes too quickly.
You may want to experiment with different themes and fonts in order to find a custom setup that works well for you.
Changing VS Code Theme
VS Code comes with a few different themes that allow you to change the colors used in the editor interface and in the code highlighting. Both dark and light styles are included by default.
Go to File -> Preferences -> Color Theme or type CTRL ? K ? T to select a different theme for VS Code.
You can also install theme extensions to further customize VS Code’s appearance. If you search for theme within the extensions tab (CTRL ? SHIFT ? X), you’ll find several theme extensions in different styles and colors, including color schemes ported from other popular editors and platforms.
Adjusting the Font
Although the default VS Code font settings will be good enough for many users, you may want to adjust the size and the type of the editor font for increased readability.
If you would like to modify the font size or change to another type, you can go to File -> Preferences -> Settings, then choose Text Editor on the left menu. Then, click on Font in the submenu that opens up. That section contains font family and size settings which you can tweak as preferred.
The changes are immediately saved and applied to all current open files.
The above is the detailed content of How To Set Up Visual Studio Code (VS Code) for PHP Development. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!
Hot AI Tools
Undress AI Tool
Undress images for free
Undresser.AI Undress
AI-powered app for creating realistic nude photos
AI Clothes Remover
Online AI tool for removing clothes from photos.
Clothoff.io
AI clothes remover
Video Face Swap
Swap faces in any video effortlessly with our completely free AI face swap tool!
Hot Article
Hot Tools
Notepad++7.3.1
Easy-to-use and free code editor
SublimeText3 Chinese version
Chinese version, very easy to use
Zend Studio 13.0.1
Powerful PHP integrated development environment
Dreamweaver CS6
Visual web development tools
SublimeText3 Mac version
God-level code editing software (SublimeText3)
Hot Topics
How Do Generators Work in PHP?
Jul 11, 2025 am 03:12 AM
AgeneratorinPHPisamemory-efficientwaytoiterateoverlargedatasetsbyyieldingvaluesoneatatimeinsteadofreturningthemallatonce.1.Generatorsusetheyieldkeywordtoproducevaluesondemand,reducingmemoryusage.2.Theyareusefulforhandlingbigloops,readinglargefiles,or
How to access a character in a string by index in PHP
Jul 12, 2025 am 03:15 AM
In PHP, you can use square brackets or curly braces to obtain string specific index characters, but square brackets are recommended; the index starts from 0, and the access outside the range returns a null value and cannot be assigned a value; mb_substr is required to handle multi-byte characters. For example: $str="hello";echo$str[0]; output h; and Chinese characters such as mb_substr($str,1,1) need to obtain the correct result; in actual applications, the length of the string should be checked before looping, dynamic strings need to be verified for validity, and multilingual projects recommend using multi-byte security functions uniformly.
How to prevent session hijacking in PHP?
Jul 11, 2025 am 03:15 AM
To prevent session hijacking in PHP, the following measures need to be taken: 1. Use HTTPS to encrypt the transmission and set session.cookie_secure=1 in php.ini; 2. Set the security cookie attributes, including httponly, secure and samesite; 3. Call session_regenerate_id(true) when the user logs in or permissions change to change to change the SessionID; 4. Limit the Session life cycle, reasonably configure gc_maxlifetime and record the user's activity time; 5. Prohibit exposing the SessionID to the URL, and set session.use_only
How to URL encode a string in PHP with urlencode
Jul 11, 2025 am 03:22 AM
The urlencode() function is used to encode strings into URL-safe formats, where non-alphanumeric characters (except -, _, and .) are replaced with a percent sign followed by a two-digit hexadecimal number. For example, spaces are converted to signs, exclamation marks are converted to!, and Chinese characters are converted to their UTF-8 encoding form. When using, only the parameter values ??should be encoded, not the entire URL, to avoid damaging the URL structure. For other parts of the URL, such as path segments, the rawurlencode() function should be used, which converts the space to . When processing array parameters, you can use http_build_query() to automatically encode, or manually call urlencode() on each value to ensure safe transfer of data. just
PHP get the first N characters of a string
Jul 11, 2025 am 03:17 AM
You can use substr() or mb_substr() to get the first N characters in PHP. The specific steps are as follows: 1. Use substr($string,0,N) to intercept the first N characters, which is suitable for ASCII characters and is simple and efficient; 2. When processing multi-byte characters (such as Chinese), mb_substr($string,0,N,'UTF-8'), and ensure that mbstring extension is enabled; 3. If the string contains HTML or whitespace characters, you should first use strip_tags() to remove the tags and trim() to clean the spaces, and then intercept them to ensure the results are clean.
PHP get the last N characters of a string
Jul 11, 2025 am 03:17 AM
There are two main ways to get the last N characters of a string in PHP: 1. Use the substr() function to intercept through the negative starting position, which is suitable for single-byte characters; 2. Use the mb_substr() function to support multilingual and UTF-8 encoding to avoid truncating non-English characters; 3. Optionally determine whether the string length is sufficient to handle boundary situations; 4. It is not recommended to use strrev() substr() combination method because it is not safe and inefficient for multi-byte characters.
How to set and get session variables in PHP?
Jul 12, 2025 am 03:10 AM
To set and get session variables in PHP, you must first always call session_start() at the top of the script to start the session. 1. When setting session variables, use $_SESSION hyperglobal array to assign values ??to specific keys, such as $_SESSION['username']='john_doe'; it can store strings, numbers, arrays and even objects, but avoid storing too much data to avoid affecting performance. 2. When obtaining session variables, you need to call session_start() first, and then access the $_SESSION array through the key, such as echo$_SESSION['username']; it is recommended to use isset() to check whether the variable exists to avoid errors
How to prevent SQL injection in PHP
Jul 12, 2025 am 03:02 AM
Key methods to prevent SQL injection in PHP include: 1. Use preprocessing statements (such as PDO or MySQLi) to separate SQL code and data; 2. Turn off simulated preprocessing mode to ensure true preprocessing; 3. Filter and verify user input, such as using is_numeric() and filter_var(); 4. Avoid directly splicing SQL strings and use parameter binding instead; 5. Turn off error display in the production environment and record error logs. These measures comprehensively prevent the risk of SQL injection from mechanisms and details.
