Avoiding PHP syntax errors with Subversion pre-commit hooks

Since my last few posts have all been about Subversion, I figured I'd do another. Our new team member is an experienced programmer, but has not had any experience with PHP. And he's not real good about actually running his code before submitting it.

PHP allows you to run its command line executable with a -l flag to catch any syntax errors in your code. Very simple, but can really help catch some stupid errors. Yes, they should definitely be caught by a code review, but code reviewers should also be able to assume that the code actually runs.

So here's a Subversion pre-commit hook that will run PHP lint on all PHP files and reject the commit if any of them fail.