PHPantom

A fast, lightweight PHP language server written in Rust. Ready in seconds, uses a fraction of the RAM other language servers need, and stays responsive throughout. No indexing phase, no waiting.

[!NOTE] PHPantom is in active development. The core editing features are solid and used daily on production codebases.

Features

PHPantom focuses on deep type intelligence. Here's how it compares:

_{🚧 = partial support. 🧩 = requires plugin. 💰 = paid tier.}

¹ Completion, hover, signature help, go-to-definition, find references, diagnostics, document symbols.

² Auto-import, go-to implementation / type-definition, smart select, folding ranges, formatting, code lens, inlay hints, type hierarchy, document links.

³ Implement interface methods, extract method/function, extract/inline variable, generate constructor, generate getter/setter.

Performance measured on a production codebase: 21K PHP files, 1.5M lines of code (vendor + application).

Want to verify? Open examples/demo.php in your editor and trigger completion at the marked locations. It exercises every type intelligence feature in the table, including edge cases where tools diverge. For Laravel specifically, open examples/laravel/ — a standalone project with real Eloquent models, config, routes, views, and translations that exercises Eloquent property resolution, query builder chaining, scopes, custom collections, and go-to-definition for config keys, route names, and translation strings.

Context-Aware Intelligence

• Smart PHPDoc completion. @throws detects uncaught exceptions in the method body, @param pre-fills from the signature, and tags are filtered to context and never suggested twice.
• Array shape inference. Literal arrays offer key completion with no annotation. Nested shapes, spreads, and array functions like array_map preserve element types.
• Closure parameter inference. $users->map(fn($u) => $u->name) infers $u as User from the collection's generic context.
• Conditional return types. PHPStan-style conditional @return types resolve to the concrete branch at each call site.
• Type aliases and shapes. @phpstan-type, @phpstan-import-type, and object{...} shapes all resolve through to completions.
• Laravel. Eloquent relationships, scopes, accessors, casts, and Builder chains resolve end-to-end. Blade templates get completion, hover, go-to-definition, and diagnostics through virtual PHP preprocessing. No Larastan, no ide-helper, no database access required.
• Everything else you'd expect. Generics, type narrowing, named arguments, destructuring, first-class callables, anonymous classes, @deprecated detection, and namespace segment drilling.

Project Awareness

PHPantom understands Composer projects out of the box, but works without setup on non-Composer projects too:

• Autoloader-accurate results. Completions and go-to-definition only surface classes that Composer's autoloader can actually load, avoiding false positives from internal, inaccessible, or duplicate vendor classes. You see exactly what your application can use.
• PSR-4 autoloading. Resolves classes across files on demand.
• Classmap and file autoloading. autoload_classmap.php and autoload_files.php.
• Embedded PHP stubs from phpstorm-stubs bundled in the binary, no runtime downloads needed.
• Drupal project support. Detects Drupal projects via composer.json, resolves the web root, and indexes Drupal-specific directories and PHP extensions (.module, .install, .theme, etc.) with .gitignore bypassed so that Composer-managed core and contrib code is always available.
• require_once discovery. Functions from required files are available for completion.
• Go-to-implementation. Jump from an interface or abstract class to all concrete implementations. Scans open files, classmap, PSR-4 directories, and embedded stubs.

Documentation

• Installation. Editor-specific setup for Zed, Neovim, PHPStorm, and others.
• CLI Reference. Batch diagnostics (analyze), automated fixes (fix), and CI integration.
• Building from Source. Build, test, and debug instructions.
• Architecture. Symbol resolution, stub loading, and inheritance merging.
• Contributing
• Changelog
• Benchmarks. Latency and memory usage tracked on every commit.
• Roadmap. Planned features and domain-specific plans.

Acknowledgements

PHPantom stands on the shoulders of:

• Mago: the PHP parser that powers all of PHPantom's AST analysis.
• PHPStan and Psalm: for their pioneering work in PHP static analysis and shaping the type ecosystem. PHPantom builds on PHPStan-informed type experience, with full support for @phpstan-* annotations.
• JetBrains phpstorm-stubs: type information for the entire PHP standard library, embedded directly into the binary.
• Phpactor: the PHP language server whose comprehensive test suite and benchmark fixtures informed PHPantom's own test coverage. Many of PHPantom's type inference fixtures were adapted from Phpactor's reflection tests.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.