Code Quality Gates: Laravel Pint and PHPStan in CI

The moment you add a code quality gate to CI, something quietly changes on your team. Developers stop arguing about code style in reviews because the robot handles it. Static-analysis errors stop reaching production because they can't pass the gate. You stop inheriting other people's technical debt because new errors are blocked immediately, even if old ones exist. That last point is the PHPStan baseline trick. We'll get to it. The Code Quality Job This job runs on every push and is intentionally fast — no database, no migrations, just PHP and a vendor folder: quality: name: Code Quality runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v4 - name: Setup PHP 8.4 uses: shivammathur/setup-php@v2 with: php-version: '8.4' extensions: mbstring, pdo, bcmath, zip, intl coverage: none tools: composer:v2 - name: Cache Composer dependencies uses: actions/cache@v4 with: path: api/vendor key: php-8.4-composer-${{ hashFiles('api/composer.lock') }} restore-keys: php-8.4-composer- - name: Install dependencies run: composer install --no-interaction --prefer-dist --no-progress - name: Check formatting (Laravel Pint) run: ./vendor/bin/pint --test - name: Static analysis (PHPStan) run: ./vendor/bin/phpstan analyse --memory-limit=2G --no-progress pint --test runs in read-only mode — it checks without modifying files. Exit code 1 if any file has style drift. Run ./vendor/bin/pint locally (without --test ) to auto-fix before pushing. Configuring PHPStan Add a phpstan.neon to your API root: parameters: level: 8 paths: - app - Modules excludePaths: - vendor ignoreErrors: - identifier: missingType.iterableValue - identifier: missingType.generics Level 8 is strict. On a fresh project, aim for it from day one. On an existing codebase, start at level 4 and raise it gradually. The Memory Problem PHPStan at level 8 on a large codebase needs more than 512MB of RAM. Use --memory-limit=2G in CI. Locally, add a shortcut to composer.json : "scripts": { "analyse": "php -d memory_limit=2G vendor/bi