Our favorite PhpStorm Live Templates + Share yours

Live templates? To see one in action, open a file in PhpStorm that has some HTML. Now type just a and hit tab. Boom! This quickly becomes <a href=""></a> with your cursor already waiting inside the quotes for you to type the URL. Hit tab again, and your cursor moves between the tags so you can add text.

Most editors have a feature like this, and if you're not leveraging them, you're slowing yourself down. Seriously: taking a few minutes to get into these now could add up to a lot of hours saved in the future. The vim users at KnpLabs love this kind of stuff, and have published their own snippets ( docteurklein, PedroTroller, Einenlum ).

In our tutorial about live templates, we turn formhandle into a snippet that types about 10 lines of form-handling boilerplate code from 10 characters of text. So I started wondering: what are some other awesome live templates we should all be using? On Facebook, someone asked if these were shareable... and of course they are - just like all PhpStorm configuration.

A Repository for Live Templates (and other Settings)

So we created a repository to share useful PhpStorm settings (including live templates of course):

https://github.com/knpuniversity/phpstorm-settings

Feel free to copy from this, or use it all - instructions are on the repository.

The starting list includes:

• 404Unless (controller): Adds an if statement with a 404
• action (controller): Builds an action method
• formhandle (controller): Adds form-handling boiler-plate code
• formrow (twig): Renders form_row(form.???)
• formrowfull (twig): Renders the widget, label and errors for a field
• include (twig): Adds {{ include('???') }}
• method (controller): Adds @Method annotation
• path (twig): Adds {{ path('???') }}
• render (twig): Adds {{ render(controller('???')) }}
• rendertwig (controller) Adds $this->render('???')
• repofind (controller) Adds $this->getDoctrine()->getRepository('???')->???()
• route (controller) Adds @Route annotation
• service (yaml) Adds the basic YAML service definition structure
• tags (yaml) Adds a tags line to a service

I'm not the first person to do this, but I'm hoping that you'll suggest some more live templates, make these better, and even start adding other things - like code stylings, file templates and colors.

Happy (fast) coding!