PHPCs can be used to check if your code base is compatible with a different version on PHP. This is very handy if you want to check if your project can be upgraded to PHP 7.4 or 8.1

Install

First install PHP_CodeSniffer if you haven't yet done so

composer global require "squizlabs/php_codesniffer=*"

Then install php-compatibility

composer global require "phpcompatibility/php-compatibility"

You may need to set the PHP_CodeSniffer config path to use PHPCompatibility

phpcs --config-set installed_paths /path/to/PHPCompatibility

Usage

phpcs -p ~/path/to/project --standard=PHPCompatibility --runtime-set testVersion 8.1

• -p = The path to the project
• -standard = the check to run
• --runtime-set = Options to set at run time
• testVersion = The version of PHP to test against. In this case PHP 8.1

More options can be found in the GitHub documentation