Workflow for recursive search/replace in a PHP project

Quick notes of how to recusively replace strings in a php project.

Use case

Our Open Source xAPI LRS lxHive changes ownership from Brightcookie to G3 International. This sounds a bit more dramatic than it actually is. The team behind lxHive stays the same, only the organisation changes. I won’t go into details, because they are neither related to this topic nor to the LRS itself. Instead I refer to the offical annoucement

Scope

So we need to replace occurences of Brightcookie with G3 International. This mainly affects mainly documentation and license headers inside hundreds of code files. The approach is (as often) a mix of individual review and low-level automation.

Notes

The search and replace queries int this example are case case insensitive.

We omit .git and vendor directories.Depending on your project type you might add a few more.

For example inside a Laravel app you should exclude storage and database folders and handle them independently. If your project includes Javascript packages exclude node_module

Workflow

Rewiew affected lines (export to file)

grep -nri "<old-string>" . --exclude-dir={.git,_dev} >> /<path>/grep.txt

Apply changes, ignore .git and vendor folder(s)

find . -type f  -not -path '*/\.git/*' -not -path '*/vendor/*' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/<old-string>/<new-string>/g'

Recursively lint php files

find . -type f -name '*.php'  -not -path '*/\.git/*' -not -path '*/vendor/*' -exec php -l {} \; | grep -v "No syntax errors detected"

List changed files

git status

Review diff changes

git diff

Run unit tests

./vendor/bin/phpunit

Ready to commit!