Sunday, August 16, 2009

Using phpDocumentor with Eclipse



I just finished making improvements to a PHP/MySQL-powered photo gallery website I had written during college (it kind of felt good to see how much my coding skills have improved since then). Besides moving all the SQL into a DAO, cleaning up the UI, and learning how to do file uploads in PHP, I went through all the code and formally documented all the functions and classes. I decided to use phpDocumentor because the format it requires the comments to be in is nearly identical to Java's Javadoc, which I was already familiar with.

I wanted to set up an Ant target that I could run that would generate the HTML documentation. It was pretty straight-forward--just create a target using the Exec task to run a console command. However, even though I could call the "phpdoc" command straight from the command line, Ant had problems with that. I think this is because "phpdoc" is not an executable, but a PHP script. At any rate, it worked fine once I found the script that the command was linked to and used the "php" command to run the script.

<target name="phpdocs" description="Generates phpDocumentor docs">
<delete dir="${doc.dir}" />
<exec executable="php">
<arg value="/usr/local/PEAR/PhpDocumentor/phpDocumentor/phpdoc.inc" />
<arg value="-f" />
<arg value="*.php" />
<arg value="-t" />
<arg value="${doc.dir}" />
<arg value="-ti" />
<arg value="Photo Gallery Documentation" />
</exec>
</target>