Refactoring Huge Legacy PHP Applications - From 100 hours to minutes
summary
Claims automated refactoring cuts huge PHP upgrades from weeks to minutes by writing reusable rules and running them across the codebase. Uses Rector built on PHP-Parser with PHPStan for types, applies a rule to 1000 classes in seconds. Demonstrated migrating a 54k‑line MVC app with 150 routes — first run took ~80 hours to craft rules, subsequent runs are minutes; handles countable checks, eval->AST transforms, Twig namespacing and PHPUnit upgrades, and preserves tests.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:15Education
- 3:10Undocumented BCs
- 6:45Code becomes legacy
- 12:00Technical details
- 13:28Help
- 16:55Code Quality
- 18:45Code Cleanup
- 23:21Troubleshooting
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