I built an open-source static flow analyzer for Symfony — PHPFlow v0.1.0

[u/Patryyyck]

Hi everyone,

I’ve just released the first public version of PHPFlow, an open-source static flow analyzer for PHP/Symfony applications.

The idea came from a problem I regularly run into on larger applications: answering a question like “what actually happens when this route is called?” can mean jumping through a controller, several services, Messenger dispatches and handlers, repositories, database queries and external APIs.

PHPFlow analyzes the source code without running the target application and reconstructs those flows as a graph.

For example, it can help answer:

• What happens when this Symfony route is called?
• Which routes/messages can reach this database table?
• What depends on this service?
• Where is this Messenger message handled?
• Which flows call this external API?
• Where can this exception surface?

v0.1.0 currently understands Symfony routes, dependency injection, Messenger, repositories, Doctrine DBAL/QueryBuilder, external HTTP calls, exceptions and a number of control-flow patterns.

It also generates a self-contained interactive HTML viewer with search, functional lanes, Messenger boundaries, minimap, path-to-effects and critical-path exploration.

PHPFlow is deliberately conservative: if it cannot prove a relationship statically, it doesn’t invent one. It also never boots or executes the application being analyzed.

There’s a bundled Symfony demo, so after cloning:

make setup
make demo

I’m especially interested in trying it against real-world Symfony applications now. If you give it a try and it misses a pattern used by your project, I’d really like to hear about it.

GitHub: github.com/patryyyck/phpflow

Feedback, bug reports and criticism are very welcome.