swoole/ide-helper

Swoole IDE Helper

Swoole is a PHP extension written in C/C++, so its classes, functions, and constants don't exist as PHP source code anywhere in your project. Without help, your IDE can't see them: no autocompletion, no parameter hints, no inline documentation, and plenty of "undefined class" warnings.

This package fixes that. It provides fully documented stub files for everything Swoole exposes — every class, method, function, and constant, with accurate signatures, native type declarations, and PHPDoc descriptions. Once it's installed, IDEs like PhpStorm and VS Code (with a PHP language server such as Intelephense) pick up the stubs automatically and give you the same editing experience you'd get with a pure-PHP library.

The stubs contain no executable logic — every method body is empty — so the package has zero runtime footprint.

Installation

Install it with Composer as a dev dependency:

composer require --dev swoole/ide-helper

Since the package is only there to assist your IDE, it doesn't belong in production; --dev keeps it out of composer install --no-dev deployments.

Match the version to your Swoole extension

Releases of this package mirror Swoole releases: version 6.0.2 of this package documents Swoole v6.0.2. For the most accurate results, pin the package to the Swoole version you actually run. You can check your installed version with:

php --ri swoole | grep Version

Then require the matching release, e.g.:

composer require --dev swoole/ide-helper:~6.0.2

To use the latest unreleased stubs from the master branch instead:

composer require --dev swoole/ide-helper:@dev

Best practices

• Keep it a dev dependency. The stubs are for your editor only. They declare no autoloading and execute nothing, but there's still no reason to ship them to production.
• Upgrade the helper when you upgrade Swoole. Signatures and available symbols change between Swoole releases; a mismatched helper version means your IDE may suggest methods that don't exist in your runtime (or miss ones that do).
• PhpStorm users: disable the bundled Swoole stubs. PhpStorm ships its own (less complete) Swoole stubs, which conflict with this package and cause "multiple definitions exist" warnings. Go to Settings → PHP → Stubs and deselect swoole, so this package becomes the single source of truth.
• Don't require/include the stub files. If the Swoole extension is loaded, redefining its classes would fail; if it isn't, empty method bodies would do nothing useful anyway. Just let Composer install the package and let your IDE index it.

What's included

• src/swoole/ — stubs for everything implemented in C/C++ by the Swoole extension:
  • all classes under the Swoole\ namespace (one file per class, e.g. Swoole\Coroutine\Http\Client);
  • global swoole_*() functions;
  • SWOOLE_* constants;
  • short class aliases like Co\Channel (active when the swoole.use_shortname ini directive is on).
• src/swoole_library/ — the PHP source of Swoole Library, the userland companion code that ships inside the extension (loaded when swoole.enable_library is on). Included so your IDE can index these classes too.

PHP configuration settings

Swoole's behavior can be tuned with the following ini directives:

• swoole.display_errors: Boolean. Default On. Display/hide error information from Swoole.
• swoole.enable_coroutine: Boolean. Default On. Turn on/off coroutine support.
• swoole.enable_library: Boolean. Default On. Load the source code from Swoole Library or not.
• swoole.enable_preemptive_scheduler: Boolean. Default Off. Enable preemptive scheduler or not. To understand how it works, please check examples under section "CPU-intensive job scheduling" of repository deminy/swoole-by-examples.
• swoole.unixsock_buffer_size: Integer (in bytes). By default, it's 256 KiB on Macintosh or FreeBSD, otherwise 8 MiB. The total buffer sizes for the socket connections between the master process and the worker processes in Swoole.
• swoole.use_shortname: Boolean. Default On. Support short names or not. Short names are all the aliases listed in file src/swoole/shortnames.php.

All the directives can be set anywhere except swoole.use_shortname, which can only be set in php.ini files.