Problems with Property Hooks

[LordSimal]

Doing a simple

class ConfigChecker
{
    public FTPInterface $ftpCheckObject {
        get {
            return $this->ftpCheckObject;
        }
        set(FTPInterface $value) {
            $this->ftpCheckObject = $value;
        }
    }
}

causes the following errors:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOUND 10 ERRORS AND 2 WARNINGS AFFECTING 4 LINES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 10 | ERROR   | There must not be more than one property declared per statement
 12 | ERROR   | Visibility must be declared on property "$this"
 12 | ERROR   | Scope modifier not specified for member variable "$this"
 14 | WARNING | Code after the RETURN statement on line 12 cannot be executed
 14 | ERROR   | There must not be more than one property declared per statement
 14 | ERROR   | Visibility must be declared on property "$value"
 14 | ERROR   | Scope modifier not specified for member variable "$value"
 15 | WARNING | Code after the RETURN statement on line 12 cannot be executed
 15 | ERROR   | There must not be more than one property declared per statement
 15 | ERROR   | Visibility must be declared on property "$this"
 15 | ERROR   | Scope modifier not specified for member variable "$this"
 15 | ERROR   | Scope modifier not specified for member variable "$value"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[LordSimal]

Seems like PHP_Codesniffer is not 8.4 ready yet

PHPCSStandards/PHP_CodeSniffer#734

[ADmad]

phpcs v4 beta1 is out. Hoping by the time it's stable it will have support for property hooks.

[mirko-pagliai]

4.0.0 was released yesterday

[dereuromark]

Upstream Dependency

This issue cannot be fixed in cakephp-codesniffer - it requires changes in PHP_CodeSniffer itself.

The Problem

When PHPCS parses property hooks like:

public string $bar {
    get => $this->privateBar;
    set(string $value) {
        $this->privateBar = $value;
    }
}

The tokenizer doesn't understand get/set hook syntax. It misidentifies $this and $value inside hooks as property declarations, causing false positives from sniffs like PSR2.Classes.PropertyDeclaration.

Upstream Tracking

PHPCS is tracking PHP 8.4 property hooks support in PHPCSStandards/PHP_CodeSniffer#734.

Current status of property hooks support in PHPCS 4.x:

Feature	Status
final properties	✅ Done
abstract properties	✅ Done
Properties on interfaces	⚠️ Partial
Hook syntax (long form)	❌ Not implemented
Hook syntax (short/arrow form)	❌ Not implemented
Hook syntax in constructor promotion	❌ Not implemented

The hook syntax itself (which causes the errors reported here) is not yet implemented.

From the PHPCS maintainer (comment):

property hooks is the bane of my existence and will be a nightmare to add support for in PHPCS. The tokenizer support alone is going to take months of work, as it is not 1 syntax they have added, but over a dozen new syntaxes, all under one RFC...

Why We Can't Fix This Here

• We can't fix PHPCS's tokenizer from a coding standard
• We can't selectively suppress errors inside hooks because PHPCS doesn't recognize hook context
• Excluding problematic sniffs entirely would disable legitimate checks everywhere

Workaround

Until PHPCS adds support, you can use // phpcs:ignore comments around property hooks:

// phpcs:ignore
public string $bar {
    get => $this->privateBar;
    set(string $value) {
        $this->privateBar = $value;
    }
}