7 Ways How PhpStorm Helps to Refactor Code

PhpStorm is a powerful IDE for PHP development, with many features to write code faster and more efficiently, including refactoring your code. In this tutorial, let's look at some examples, with screenshots.

Example 1: Renaming Variables

When working with variables - it often gets hard to name them (naming is hard right?). It sometimes leads to variables being named in a way that is not very descriptive. So you want to rename them to something more meaningful. PhpStorm has a feature that helps you do that:

In this case, our variable is going to be $q and it's not very descriptive here:

So we want to rename it to something more meaningful. We can do that by right-clicking on the variable name and selecting Refactor > Rename:

This will even give us suggestions:

We can select one of the suggestions or type in our own name. In this case, we are going to rename it to $query:

This has a few benefits:

1. It suggests a name that is more descriptive given the context it understands
2. It renames the variable in all places where it is used
3. You don't have to worry about missing any places where the variable is used

Example 2: Renaming Classes

Renaming classes is a bit more involved than renaming variables. But PhpStorm has a feature...