Cannot run psalm without a composer autoloader

[ewingd]

I have psalm installed globally and wanted to run it on a single file that has no includes and doesn't need or use an autoloader. I am attempting to create a minimum test case to reproduce an exception psalm is throwing on a larger project.

It refused to run with the message:

Could not find any composer autoloaders in <project_dir>
Add a --root=[your/project/directory] flag to specify a particular project to run Psalm on.

$ tree
.
├── psalm.xml
└── src
    └── main.php


$ cat psalm.xml 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<psalm>
    <projectFiles>
        <directory name="src" />
    </projectFiles>
</psalm>

[weirdan]

Well, docs say psalm requires composer (and its autoloader). It doesn't need to be functional though, so you can work around this with composer init; composer install; psalm

[weirdan]

If you encounter 'No lockfile found' error you can safely ignore it.

[muglug]

Well, docs say psalm requires composer (and its autoloader)

Yeah, although I can see why you might not want that. It shouldn't need composer (e.g. when running from the phar or from another directory) and I'll try and get that working properly.

[sebastianbergmann]

I have this problem with Psalm 3.2.7:

$ ./tools/psalm --init
Failed to find a valid Composer ClassLoader in

Not even --version works:

$ ./tools/psalm --version
Failed to find a valid Composer ClassLoader in

However, --help works.

As soon as an autoloader generated using Composer exists in vendor/autoload.php it works:

$ composer init                                                   
  Welcome to the Composer config generator  

This command will guide you through creating your composer.json config.

Package name (<vendor>/<name>) [sebastianbergmann/example]: 
Description []: 
Author [Sebastian Bergmann <sb@sebastian-bergmann.de>, n to skip]: 
Minimum Stability []: 
Package Type (e.g. library, project, metapackage, composer-plugin) []: 
License []: 

Define your dependencies.

Would you like to define your dependencies (require) interactively [yes]? 
Search for a package: 
Would you like to define your dev dependencies (require-dev) interactively [yes]? 
Search for a package: 

{
    "name": "sebastianbergmann/example",
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Sebastian Bergmann",
            "email": "sb@sebastian-bergmann.de"
        }
    ],
    "require": {}
}

Do you confirm generation [yes]? 

$ composer install
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
Nothing to install or update
Generating autoload files

$ ./tools/psalm --version
Psalm 3.2.7.0@6e010d9db95275725e5ad6409c387eb173091f72

[muglug]

@sebastianbergmann what's tools/psalm - is it a symlink to Psalm in another directory? I've added a slightly better error message in 5003533, but still need more info.

[sebastianbergmann]

tools/psalm is https://github.com/vimeo/psalm/releases/download/3.2.7/psalm.phar (no symlink; installed using phive install --copy).

[muglug]

The original fix did not apply to the Phar, but I've just patched it to hopefully work more robustly.

[sebastianbergmann]

I am seeing this problem (or a problem that looks like it) again with Psalm 5.1.0: without a Composer-generated autoloader present, Psalm refuses to start.

[weirdan]

@sebastianbergmann does this only happen for psalm.phar --init?

[sebastianbergmann]

No, it is not limited to --init. A simple mkdir vendor && touch vendor/autoload.php works around this.

[weirdan]

@sebastianbergmann is there any way for me to reproduce it?

I tried, but everything seems to be working for me:

[sebastianbergmann]

No, sorry, this is in an internal project. If/When I am able to reproduce it in a minimal and self-contained way then I will open a new ticket. Sorry for the noise!

[weirdan]

No problem. At the very least it led to error message improvement in #8827