How can I declare that a constant is defined in PhpDoc (for intelephense)?

Question

TL;DR

How can I document a constant that is defined in external code using PhpDoc/DocBlocks so that it will not show up as an undefined variable in static code analysis?

Details:

I'm trying to write a small WordPress plugin. I have some PHP code like below.

defined('ABSPATH') or die('Access denied!'); // Avoid direct file request

function getPluginInfo($key) {
    require_once ABSPATH . '/wp-admin/includes/plugin.php';
    $data = get_plugin_data(MY_PLUGIN_FILE, true, false);
    return $data[$key];
}

I'm using the VSCode plugin vscode-intelephense (which provides a PHP language service). I have all the necessary dependencies installed, including listing "wordpress" as a stub in the VSCode settings. In general, the intelephense is working quite well and is doing a great job of showing information about my code as well as WordPress library code.

However intelephense shows an error: "Undefined constant '...\ABSPATH' (1011)" (where the dots are a namespace that I have omitted for brevity).

So it appears that intelephense doesn't pick up on the condition implied by the first line -- namely that if ABSPATH isn't defined, execution won't reach the later code that references it. (Which is perfectly fine, program flow analysis might be demanding too much). Anyway, I think I should be able to add some kind of PhpDoc (or another commented annotation) to indicate to code analyzers that the variable is defined. Something like this:

/**
 * @var string ABSPATH
 */

or this:

/**
 * @global string ABSPATH
 */

But neither of those cause the error to go away. (I also tried @const which doesn't appear to be a real tag. It didn't work either.)

Is there some way in the code I can indicate that ABSPATH is defined in external code or in an out scope? Adding a line at the top of the function like global ABSPATH; doesn't seem to be right either, because ABSPATH isn't a variable. It's a define-created constant.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Similar to the wordpress stub that you have enabled to give you wp intellisense, you would have to create a stub file for your constants and add it to your workspace so that it can be indexed.

<?php

const ABSPATH = '';