What’s New in PhpStorm 2021.2

We have added support for generics via the @template annotation. This makes working with collections more straightforward in many cases, because the suggestions will contain elements of the expected type.

For factory patterns, you can now use the class-string<T> annotation and you will get better code completion.

This preliminary support for generics is not complete and has known limitations. You can learn more about it in this blog post.

One of the most highly anticipated features of the PHP 8.1 release is enums.

With PhpStorm 2021.2, you can start using enums immediately. The IDE offers code suggestions and validation to protect you from using them incorrectly.

An enum in PHP contains a set of cases, can have methods, and can be used as a type hint – in all of these cases PhpStorm will provide error highlighting and proper suggestions to save you time.

Enum cases can have scalar equivalents. This is useful if you need to save an enum to a data store. Such enums are known as backed enums.

With a quick-fix, you can add a scalar type declaration to a backed enum.

Enums also work well with other features, such as conditions and match expressions.

Learn more

If there are object-like arrays in your code, you can now define their structure with this PHPDoc annotation: array{key: type, key: type, ...}.

PhpStorm provides code completion for such annotated arrays, reducing the time you spend on routine typing and protecting you from mistakes.

The support is limited to one-line array shape definitions. For larger structures, it is often better to use real objects and classes.

PhpStorm has a Duplicated code fragment inspection. It highlights any chunks of code that are very similar – the formatting, variable names, and statement order can be different as long as the end result is the same.

This inspection highlights the first lines of duplicated fragments. You can now quickly refactor such code by pressing Alt+Enter on the highlighted line and invoking the Extract Method refactoring from the duplicate code quick-fix.

PhpStorm can also find duplicates of smaller code fragments in the current scope (method, class, or file) during refactoring. Select a code fragment and then call the refactoring with ⌘⌥M (Cmd+Alt+M / Ctrl+Alt+M). You will see the Review and replace duplicates checkbox at the bottom of the dialog.

You can also invoke the Extract Method refactoring without selecting any code. In this case, PhpStorm suggests a list of possible code fragments. The suggestions are filtered and contain only segments that make sense to refactor.

You probably already know that you can select a piece of code with the Expand / Shrink selection action ⌥+Up / ⌥+Down (Ctrl+W / Ctrl+Shift+W). This is one of the fastest ways to select code for refactoring.

This release introduces a small but useful update – the ability to select blocks without curly braces.

The Extract Method refactoring has even more improvements! Check out all the details in this blog post.

Replace unnecessary checks for null with the new safe operator from PHP 8. Press Alt+Enter to perform the transformation.

PhpStorm will highlight constants that are accessed via subclass or subinterface instead of the entity where the constant is defined. Replace the name of the entity with the one where the constant is defined using the Alt+Enter quick-fix.

PhpStorm will now evaluate parts of conditions to identify any redundancies. This can be useful when the checks are not obvious and you can’t tell which ones are redundant just by looking at them.

This group includes inspections that can help identify good candidates for refactoring. These inspections are disabled by default, but even in this disabled state, you’ll see an additional gutter icon near the code they detect (instead of having it underlined in the editor).

Clicking the gutter icon will invoke the suggested refactoring.

These inspections are combinations of various code quality metrics: cyclomatic complexity, nesting depth, number of variables used, total number of lines, and many others.

You can find the list of metrics used in the description of each inspection.

Learn more

We’ve expanded the list of possible pre-commit actions with the ability to execute tests. Tick the Run Tests checkbox and select the configuration to run. It is useful to get the code verified before it is in the VCS.

You can now also customize the Analyze code and Cleanup options by clicking Choose profile next to them.

Starting from this version, you can enjoy the fully localized UI of PhpStorm in Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Localization is available as non-bundled language pack plugins, which can be easily installed to your IDE*. More than 1.5 mln users started using the partially localized EAP version of our language packs. Now you can enjoy the full localization experience!