Claude Code for PHP Developers
PHP still runs a huge share of the web: Laravel SaaS products, Symfony platforms, WordPress and WooCommerce stores, Drupal and Magento sites, and millions of legacy applications that quietly pay the bills. Maintaining, securing and modernizing all of that code is slow, repetitive and risky work, which is exactly where an AI coding agent earns its keep.
Claude Code is not a chat window where you paste snippets. It lives in your terminal, reads your whole repository, edits files, runs Composer, PHPUnit, Pest, PHPStan and Artisan, and keeps iterating until the result passes your checks. PHP happens to be an ideal partner for this style of work, because its modern tooling (static analysis, automated refactoring, fast test runners) gives the agent clear pass or fail feedback after every change.
This guide is a practical playbook, not a theory book. You will set up Claude Code safely, teach it your project rules, build a complete PHP program step by step, solve ten difficult real-world problems, apply it inside every major PHP framework, extend it with plugins, control its cost, and run several agents in parallel.
What you will be able to do after this guide
- Install and configure Claude Code with safe permissions for any PHP project
- Plan, build, test and review features with a repeatable workflow
- Upgrade legacy PHP, fix security holes and remove performance bottlenecks with evidence
- Estimate what a program costs and price client work with confidence
- Scale up with subagents, Git worktrees and headless automation