Plugin Check is a WordPress.org tool which provides checks to help plugins meet the directory requirements and follow various best practices.
- Allows analyzing any installed plugin using either a WP Admin screen or a WP-CLI command.
- Supports two kinds of checks:
- Static checks, which analyze the code, either using PHPCodeSniffer sniffs or custom logic e.g. using regular expressions.
- Runtime checks, which actually execute certain parts of the code, such as running specific WordPress hooks with the plugin active.
- Allows customizing which checks are run, either via a list of individual check identifiers, or specific check categories.
- Comes with an ever-growing list of checks for various plugin development requirements and best practices. Please see the
Default_Check_Repository::register_default_checks()method for a quick overview of currently available checks.
- Facilitates efficient yet flexible authoring of new checks, either using a base class for common check patterns, or implementing an interface for more specific checks.
- Every check has to implement either the
Static_Checkor theRuntime_Checkinterface. - Most checks will benefit from extending either the
Abstract_File_Check, theAbstract_PHPCodeSniffer_Check, or theAbstract_Runtime_Checkclass.
- Every check has to implement either the
- Comes with comprehensive unit test coverage.
The WordPress plugin checker is a WordPress plugin itself, which can be installed on any WordPress site. While it is implemented in a way that should avoid any disruptions on the site that it is being used on, it is still advised not to use the plugin checker in a production environment.
Currently, the only way to install the plugin checker is to download it from this GitHub repository. Please see the contributing section below for further instructions. Once a first beta version is available, it will be distributed in a standalone ZIP file, e.g. via the wordpress.org plugin repository.
After having the plugin activated, you can analyze any other plugin installed on the same site, either using the WP Admin user interface or WP-CLI:
- To check a plugin using WP Admin, please navigate to the Tools > Plugin Check menu. You need to be able to manage plugins on your site in order to access that screen.
- To check a plugin using WP-CLI, please use the
wp plugin checkcommand. For example, to check the "Hello Dolly" plugin:wp plugin check hello.php- Note that by default when using WP-CLI, only static checks can be executed. In order to also include runtime checks, a workaround is currently necessary using the
--requireargument of WP-CLI, to manually load thecli.phpfile within the plugin checker directory before WordPress is loaded. For example:wp plugin check hello.php --require=./wp-content/plugins/plugin-check/cli.php - You could use arbitrary path or URL to check a plugin. For example, to check a plugin from a URL:
wp plugin check https://example.com/plugin.zipor to check a plugin from a path:wp plugin check /path/to/plugin
- Note that by default when using WP-CLI, only static checks can be executed. In order to also include runtime checks, a workaround is currently necessary using the
Screenshot of the plugin checker's UI in WP Admin
To set up the repository locally, you will need to clone this GitHub repository (or a fork of it) and then install the relevant dependencies:
git clone https://github.com/WordPress/plugin-check.git wp-content/plugins/plugin-check
cd wp-content/plugins/plugin-check
composer install
npm install
With the above commands, you can use the plugin in any development environment as you like. The recommended way is to use the built-in development environment, which is based on the @wordpress/env package, as that will allow you to use the preconfigured commands to e.g. run unit tests, linting etc. You will need to have Docker installed to use this environment.
You can start the built-in environment as follows:
npm run wp-env start
If you want to stop the environment again, you can use:
npm run wp-env stop
For further information on contributing, please see the contributing guide.
To learn more about the functionality and technical details of the WordPress plugin checker, please refer to the technical documentation.
The WordPress plugin checker is free software, and is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE for complete license.