PHPantom

A fast, lightweight PHP language server written in Rust. Uses only a few MB of RAM regardless of project size and is fully responsive in milliseconds. No indexing phase, no background workers, no waiting.

Note

PHPantom is in active development. Completion, go-to-definition, hover, and signature help are solid and used daily. Find references, diagnostics, and rename are on the roadmap.

Features

PHPantom focuses on completion and go-to-definition. Here's how it compares:

	PHPantom	Intelephense	PHP Tools	Phpactor	PHPStorm
Completion	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Auto-import	✅	💰	✅	✅	✅
Go-to-definition	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Go-to-implementation	🚧	✅	❌	✅	✅
@mixin completion	✅	💰	✅	✅	🚧
@phpstan annotations	✅	❌	🚧	❌	🚧
Conditional return types	✅	❌	✅	❌	❌
Laravel Eloquent	✅	❌	❌	❌	🧩
Array shape inference	✅	❌	✅	❌	🚧
Object shape completion	✅	❌	✅	❌	🚧
Generator body types	✅	❌	🚧	❌	❌
Closure param inference	✅	🚧	🚧	🚧	❌
Hover	🚧	✅	✅	✅	✅
Signature help	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Find references	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅
Diagnostics	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅
Rename / refactoring	❌	💰	✅	✅	✅
Time to ready	10 ms	1 min 25 s	3 min 17 s	15 min 39 s	19 min 38 s
RAM usage	7 MB	520 MB	3.9 GB	498 MB	2.0 GB
Disk cache	0	45 MB	0	4.1 GB	551 MB

_{Performance measured on a production codebase: 21K PHP files, 1.5M lines of code (vendor + application). 🚧 = partial support. 🧩 = requires plugin.}

Want to verify? Open example.php in your editor and trigger completion at the marked locations. It exercises every feature in the table, including edge cases where tools diverge.

Context-Aware Intelligence

• Smart PHPDoc completion. @throws detects uncaught exceptions in the method body, @param pre-fills from the signature, and tags are filtered to context and never suggested twice.
• Array shape inference. Literal arrays offer key completion with no annotation. Nested shapes, spreads, and array functions like array_map preserve element types.
• Closure parameter inference. $users->map(fn($u) => $u->name) infers $u as User from the collection's generic context.
• Generator body types. yield and $x = yield resolve to the correct TValue and TSend from the generator's return annotation.
• Conditional return types. PHPStan-style conditional @return types resolve to the concrete branch at each call site.
• Type aliases and shapes. @phpstan-type, @phpstan-import-type, and object{...} shapes all resolve through to completions.
• Laravel Eloquent. Relationships, scopes, accessors, casts, and Builder chains resolve end-to-end. No Larastan, no ide-helper, no database access required.
• Everything else you'd expect. Generics, type narrowing, named arguments, destructuring, first-class callables, anonymous classes, @deprecated detection, and namespace segment drilling.

Project Awareness

PHPantom understands Composer projects out of the box:

• Autoloader-accurate results. Completions and go-to-definition only surface classes that Composer's autoloader can actually load, avoiding false positives from internal, inaccessible, or duplicate vendor classes. The classmap is the source of truth, so you see exactly what your application can use.
• PSR-4 autoloading. Resolves classes across files on demand.
• Classmap and file autoloading. autoload_classmap.php and autoload_files.php.
• Embedded PHP stubs from phpstorm-stubs bundled in the binary, no runtime downloads needed.
• require_once discovery. Functions from required files are available for completion.
• Go-to-implementation. Jump from an interface or abstract class to all concrete implementations. Scans open files, classmap, PSR-4 directories, and embedded stubs.

Important

Run composer install -o (or composer dump-autoload -o) in your project to generate the optimized autoload files PHPantom needs for cross-file class resolution.

If your project doesn't use Composer, you can create a minimal composer.json:

{ "autoload": { "classmap": ["src/"] } }

Then run composer dump-autoload -o.

Documentation

• Installation — editor-specific setup for Zed, Neovim, PHPStorm, and others
• Building from Source — build, test, and debug instructions
• Architecture — symbol resolution, stub loading, and inheritance merging
• Contributing
• Changelog
• Roadmap — general, Laravel, Blade

Acknowledgements

PHPantom stands on the shoulders of:

• Mago: the PHP parser that powers all of PHPantom's AST analysis.
• PHPStan and Psalm: whose combined work on static analysis for PHP transformed the language's type ecosystem. Generics, array shapes, conditional return types, assertion annotations: these tools pushed each other forward and pushed the community toward rigorous PHPDoc annotations that make a language server like this possible. PHPantom's author cut his teeth on PHPStan, which is why @phpstan-* annotations are a first-class citizen here.
• JetBrains phpstorm-stubs: type information for the entire PHP standard library, embedded directly into the binary.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.