Streamlining Development Workflows in PHP: Composer Scripts vs. Makefile

How to centralize and simplify your PHP project's code quality commands.

Maintaining high code quality is a non-negotiable aspect of modern PHP development. Teams rely on a suite of tools for static analysis, testing, and code formatting to ensure consistency and prevent bugs. However, managing these tools can become a challenge. How many times have you joined a project and had to hunt down the specific commands for running tests with Pest, analyzing code with PHPStan, or fixing styles with Pint?

This fragmentation leads to inconsistency, slows down new developer onboarding, and complicates CI/CD pipeline configurations. When each developer runs slightly different commands, you lose the benefits of a unified standard. The solution is to centralize these tasks into a single, discoverable, and easy-to-use interface.

This article explores two powerful methods for streamlining your PHP development workflows: Composer scripts and Makefiles. We will compare both approaches, provide practical examples for common quality-assurance tasks, and help you decide which method is the best fit for your project.

Why Centralize Your Development Commands?

Before diving into the "how," let's establish the "why." Centralizing your project's commands offers several immediate benefits:

• Consistency: Every team member, from senior developers to new hires, executes the exact same commands, ensuring uniform code quality checks.
• Simplicity: Instead of memorizing long and complex command-line invocations, developers can use simple, memorable aliases (e.g., composer test or make quality).
• Discoverability: A single, well-documented location for all project tasks makes it easy for anyone to understand and contribute to the project's workflow.
• CI/CD Alignment: The same scripts used for local development can be seamlessly integrated into your continuous integration pipelines, creating a single source of truth for all quality checks.

In essence, you create a simple, standardized contract for how your team interacts with the project's tooling.

The Common Tasks: A Unified Goal

For our comparison, we will define a common set of code quality tasks that are typical in a modern Laravel or PHP project:

• test: Run the automated test suite (e.g., Pest or PHPUnit).
• lint: Check for syntax errors without making changes.
• format: Automatically fix code style issues (e.g., using Pint).
• analyze: Perform static analysis to find potential bugs (e.g., using PHPStan).
• quality: A master command to run all checks in sequence.

Now, let's see how we can implement this set of tasks using both Composer scripts and a Makefile.

Option 1: Composer Scripts - The Native PHP Approach

Composer, the ubiquitous dependency manager for PHP, has a built-in feature that allows you to define and run custom scripts. This is often the simplest and most direct way to centralize your commands, as it requires no external tools or dependencies.

Scripts are defined within the scripts section of your composer.json file. You can then execute them using composer <script-name>.

Example: Setting Up Composer Scripts

Here’s how you can configure the common tasks in your composer.json:

{
    "scripts": {
        "test": "vendor/bin/pest",
        "lint": "vendor/bin/pint --test",
        "format": "vendor/bin/pint",
        "analyze": "vendor/bin/phpstan analyse",
        "quality": [
            "@lint",
            "@analyze",
            "@test"
        ]
    },
    "scripts-descriptions": {
        "test": "Run the application test suite using Pest.",
        "lint": "Check for code style issues without applying fixes.",
        "format": "Automatically format the code using Pint.",
        "analyze": "Run static analysis with PHPStan.",
        "quality": "Run all code quality checks."
    }
}

With this configuration, any developer can run all quality checks with a single, simple command:
composer quality

Breaking Down the Composer Scripts Example

• Simple Aliases: Each script like "test": "vendor/bin/pest" creates a simple shortcut. composer test is much easier to remember and type than the full path to the binary.
• Chaining Scripts: The quality script demonstrates how you can compose workflows. The @ symbol tells Composer to execute another defined script. This allows you to build complex command sequences from smaller, reusable parts.
• Self-Documentation: The scripts-descriptions section provides human-readable explanations for each script. Running composer list will display these descriptions, making your workflow self-documenting.

Pros and Cons of Composer Scripts

Advantages:

• Zero Dependencies: It's built directly into Composer, which every PHP project already uses.
• Cross-Platform: Works identically on Windows, macOS, and Linux without any modifications.
• Easy to Learn: The JSON syntax is straightforward and familiar to all PHP developers.

Disadvantages:

• Limited Logic: Composer scripts do not support variables, conditional logic, or complex dependencies between tasks.
• PHP-Centric: It becomes cumbersome if your workflow involves non-PHP tasks, such as compiling JavaScript assets, managing Docker containers, or running database migrations.

When to use it: Composer scripts are the perfect choice for pure PHP projects, libraries, or any situation where the development workflow is relatively simple and centered around PHP tooling.

Option 2: Makefile - The Powerhouse for Complex Workflows

For projects with more complex needs, a Makefile is a powerful and flexible alternative. A Makefile is a script run by the make utility, a tool that has been a staple of Unix-like systems for decades. It is designed to automate compilation but is versatile enough to manage any set of command-line tasks.

Example: Setting Up a Makefile

Create a file named Makefile in your project's root directory and add the following content:

# Makefile for PHP Project

.PHONY: help test lint format analyze quality

.DEFAULT_GOAL := help

# Commands
PHP_PINT := vendor/bin/pint
PHP_STAN := vendor/bin/phpstan
PHP_PEST := vendor/bin/pest

help: ## ✨ Show this help message
	@awk 'BEGIN {FS = ":.*?## "} /^[a-zA-Z_-]+:.*?## / {printf "\033[36m%-20s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, $$2}' $(MAKEFILE_LIST)

test: ## 🧪 Run the application test suite
	@$(PHP_PEST)

lint: ## 🔍 Check for code style issues
	@$(PHP_PINT) --test

format: ## 🎨 Automatically format the code
	@$(PHP_PINT)

analyze: ## 🔬 Run static analysis with PHPStan
	@$(PHP_STAN) analyse

quality: lint analyze test ## 🚀 Run all code quality checks
	@echo "✅ All quality checks passed successfully!"

To run all quality checks, a developer simply runs:
make quality

Breaking Down the Makefile Example

• Targets: Each command block (e.g., test:) is a "target." Running make test executes the commands listed under that target.
• Variables: We define variables like PHP_PINT to store the path to our binaries. This makes the file cleaner and easier to update if paths change.
• Dependencies: The quality target lists other targets as dependencies (lint analyze test). When you run make quality, make first ensures those dependency targets are executed in order.
• Self-Documentation: The help target uses a clever awk script to parse the ## comments and generate a clean, readable help menu when a developer runs make or make help.

Pros and Cons of a Makefile

Advantages:

• Extremely Powerful: Supports variables, conditional logic, and dependencies, allowing for highly complex workflows.
• Language-Agnostic: Perfect for projects that mix PHP, JavaScript, Docker, and other technologies. You can define targets to build assets, start containers (make up), and shell into them (make shell).
• Extensible: Easily scales to include deployment scripts, database commands, and other operational tasks.

Disadvantages:

• External Dependency: Requires the make utility to be installed. While standard on macOS and Linux, Windows users will need to use WSL, Git Bash, or a similar tool.
• Syntax: The syntax can be particular, especially with its significant use of tabs instead of spaces.

When to use it: A Makefile is the ideal choice for large applications, projects with a mixed technology stack, or any team that wants a single tool to manage both development and operational tasks.

Which Approach Is Right for You?

The choice between Composer scripts and a Makefile depends entirely on your project's complexity and your team's needs.

Simple PHP Library | Composer Scripts | No extra dependencies needed, simple, and universally understood in the PHP world.
Laravel API-Only Project | Composer Scripts | The workflow is likely centered on PHP tools, making Composer a natural fit.
Full-Stack Laravel & Vue.js App | Makefile | A Makefile can manage both composer install and npm run build in a single command.
Complex Dockerized Environment | Makefile | You can create targets like make build, make up, make down, and make logs to manage your entire Docker workflow.

Many teams start with Composer scripts and "graduate" to a Makefile as their project's needs grow more complex. Both are excellent tools, and the key is to choose the one that best fits your current requirements.

Conclusion

By centralizing your project's commands, you establish a clear, consistent, and efficient workflow that benefits your entire team. Whether you choose the native simplicity of Composer scripts or the language-agnostic power of a Makefile, you are making a deliberate investment in your project's maintainability and your team's productivity. You eliminate ambiguity, reduce friction for new developers, and ensure that your local and CI environments are perfectly aligned. Take the time to set up a centralized system—your future self will thank you.