This is an version of the Coding Standards available at Urban Giraffe, which were missing a ruleset.xml file, that stopped them being detected when I downloaded them and tried passing some Wordpress core code through them.
I know very little about Codesniffer beyond what I picked up in the last hour or two of reading the docs but I'm aiming to find a happy medium between letting developers stay productive, but stopping really shocking code being committed on projects, and me stumbling through this CodeSniffer tutorial here on pear.php.net
Once you've installed PEAR, install Codesniffer:
pear install --alldeps PHP_CodeSniffer
Then install Wordpress standards
git clone git@github.com:mrchrisadams/Wordpress-Coding-Standards.git $(pear config-get php_dir)/PHP/CodeSniffer/Standards/Wordpress
Normally when working with PEAR, we'd use the pear install command, but github automatically names the files, in a way that think will confuse the pear install command, so we're falling back to git instead.
Then run the PHP code sniffer commandline tool on a given file, for example wp-cron.php.
phpcs --standard=Wordpress -s wp-cron.php
You can use this to sniff individual files, or use different flags to recursively scan all the directories in a project. This command will show you each file it's scanning, and how many errors it's finding:
phpcs -p -s -v --standard=Wordpress .
Output will like this:
Registering sniffs in Wordpress standard... DONE (11 sniffs registered)
Creating file list... DONE (705 files in queue)
Processing index.php [47 tokens in 31 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (2 errors, 0 warnings)
Processing wp-activate.php [750 tokens in 102 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (47 errors, 2 warnings)
Processing admin-ajax.php [14523 tokens in 1475 lines]... DONE in 2 seconds (449 errors, 44 warnings)
Processing admin-footer.php [183 tokens in 43 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (19 errors, 0 warnings)
Processing admin-functions.php [43 tokens in 16 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (2 errors, 0 warnings)
Processing admin-header.php [1619 tokens in 196 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (110 errors, 1 warnings)
Processing admin-post.php [144 tokens in 33 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (8 errors, 0 warnings)
Processing admin.php [1906 tokens in 238 lines]... DONE in 1 second (128 errors, 1 warnings)
Processing async-upload.php [623 tokens in 70 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (41 errors, 0 warnings)
Processing comment.php [2241 tokens in 289 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (110 errors, 3 warnings)
Processing colors-classic-rtl.css [517 tokens in 1 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (0 errors, 0 warnings)
Processing colors-classic-rtl.dev.css [661 tokens in 79 lines]... DONE in < 1 second (0 errors, 0 warnings)
Processing colors-classic.css ^C
... and so on...
Lots of Wordpress's own code doesn't conform to these standards, so running this on your entire codebase will generate lots, and lots of errors.
Instead, try installing the Wordpress standard, then invoking it from a project specific codesniffer ruleset instead, like in the supplied example file.
Remove the .example suffix from project.ruleset.xml and run it in your
project root, pointing at a given file:
mv project.ruleset.xml.example project.ruleset.xml
phpcs -s -v -p --standard=./project.ruleset.xml a-sample-file.php
I've used a tiny subset of the options available to codesniffer in this example, and there's much more you can do here in a ruleset.xml file. Check the documentation site to see a fully annotated example to build upon (which is where I started initially).
Check your PATH if it includes new binaries added into the pear directories. I had to add :/usr/local/php/bin before I could call phpcs on the command line.
Remember that you can see where pear is looking for stuff, and putting things, by calling pear config-show. This is how I found out where the Codesniffer binary was added, and where the pear library is by default.