The Dev-Nanny project is aimed to make it trivial for developers to improve the quality of the code they write, regardless of experience level.

This primary goal is supported by tools that offer education and enforcement. As Dev-Nanny uses various tools to help her make suggestions or improvements, the definition of “quality” can be defined by the programmer.

However, if a programmer finds it difficult to define “quality”, dev-nanny will make a suggestion there too.

This makes DevNanny ideally suited for both novice programmers as well as seasoned professionals.

Usage

Everything should work straight out of the box. DevNanny will be run each time a developer does a git commit.

After the next release of Dev-nanny, it can also be run from the command-line using the binary placed in the vendor/bin folder. The full command would be:

./vendor/bin/dev-nanny

On each run, all included connectors will be run.

Installation

Dev-Nanny needs to be installed per individual project using Composer. If Composer is not (yet) installed, do so before proceeding, follow the Composer installation instructions.

Run the following command on the command-line inside your project folder:

php composer.phar require dev-nanny/dev-nanny --dev

This will download everything Dev-Nanny needs and install the git hook.

Available Connectors

Connectors are available for the following tools:

Php Lint (also known as php -l)

Planned Connectors:

Config Checker (compares config files of various services against DevNanny/Config package and make suggestions for improvement)
Other Lints (js, css, yml, scss, xml, bash, etc.)
QA Tools (CodeSniffer, Copy/Paste Detector, Mess Detector, etc.)
Test Runners (PhpUnit, Behat, Codeception, PhpSpec, etc.)

What’s in the box?

Packages

This project has been divided into separate packages that each have a single, distinct, responsibility. This is done to make it as easy as possible to alter, overwrite or customise parts of DevNanny.

Dev-Nanny - Meta Package
ComposerPlugin
ConnectorBase
Connectors - Meta Package
GitHook

The chain of dependency is as follows:

   Dev-Nanny/Dev-Nanny¹ ---> Dev-Nanny/ComposerPlugin² ---> Dev-Nanny/GitHook
                |
                `-> Dev-Nanny/Connectors¹ ---> Dev-Nanny/ConnectorBase
                                           `-> Individual Connectors³
¹ = Meta Package
² = Composer Plugin
³ = Dev Nanny Connector

Trouble Shooting /FAQ

What if I don’t use `git` but `SVN`/`Mercurial`/`Bazaar`/etc.?

You will need to create an appropriate hook yourself. It will need to run DevNanny against the received file list. (See the Usage section)

If you decide to create such a hook, please share the result so others may also benefit from your efforts.

If creating a hook seems too complex or daunting, feel free to open an issue requesting an example or full implementation.

What if I don’t use any versioning tool?

If you don’t use any versioning tool ever you may want to consider starting to use one now. You are missing out on great things!

If you don’t use a versioning tool for a certain project, you can always just run dev-nanny occasionally by hand or use a file-watcher or task-runner to run dev-nanny on an interval or whenever a file changes.