Unwrap / amalgamate PHP code from several .php files

For debugging purposes, when working on PHP projects with many file / many include (example: WordPress code), I would sometimes be interested in seeing the “unwrapped” code, and to amalgamate / flatten (“flatten” is the terminology used in Photoshop-like tools when you merge many layers into one layer) all files into one big PHP file.

How to do an amalgamation of multiple PHP files?

Example:

$ php index.php --amalgamation

would take these files as input:

vars.php

<?php
$color = 'green';
$fruit = 'apple';
?>

index.php

<?php
include 'vars.php';
echo "A $color $fruit";
?>

and produce this amalgamated output:

<?php
$color = 'green';
$fruit = 'apple';
echo "A $color $fruit";
?>

(it should work also with many files, e.g. if index.php includes vars.php which itself includes abc.php).

Answer

We can write an amalgamation/bundling script that fetches a given file’s contents and matches any instances of include|require, and then fetches any referred files’ contents, and substitutes the include/require calls with the actual code.

The following is a rudimentary implementation that will work (based on a very limited test on files with nested references) with any number of files that include/require other files.

<?php

// Main file that references further files:
$start = 'test/test.php';

function bundle_files(string $filepath)
{
    // Fetch current code
    $code = file_get_contents($filepath);
    
    // Set directory for referred files
    $dirname = pathinfo($filepath, PATHINFO_DIRNAME);
    
    // Match and substitute include/require(_once) with code:
    $rx = '~((include|require)(_once)?)s+['"](?<path>[^'"]+)['"];~';

    $code = preg_replace_callback($rx, function($m) use ($dirname) {
        // Ensure a valid filepath or abort:
        if($path = realpath($dirname . '/' . $m['path'])) {
            return bundle_files($path);         
        } else {
            die("Filepath Read Fail: {$dirname}/{$m['path']}");
        }
    }, $code);
    
    // Remove opening PHP tags, note source filepath
    $code = preg_replace('~^s*<?phps*~i', "n// ==== Source: {$filepath} ====nn", $code);
    
    // Remove closing PHP tags, if any
    $code = preg_replace('~?>s*$~', '', $code);   
    
    return $code;
}

$bundle = '<?php ' . "n" . bundle_files($start);

file_put_contents('bundle.php', $bundle);
echo $bundle;

Here we use preg_replace_callback() to match and substitute in order of appearance, with the callback calling the bundling function on each matched filepath and substituting include/require references with the actual code. The function also includes a comment line indicating the source of the included file, which may come in handy if/when you’re debugging the compiled bundle file.

Notes/Homework:

You may need to refine the base directory reference routine. (Expect trouble with “incomplete” filepaths that rely on PHP include_path.)
There is no control of _once, code will be re-included. (Easy to remedy by recording included filepaths and skipping recurrences.)
Matching is only made on "path/file.php", ie. unbroken strings inside single/double quotes. Concatenated strings are not matched.
Paths including variables or constants are not understood. Files would have to be evaluated, without side-effects!, for that to be possible.
If you use declare(strict_types=1);, place it atop and eliminate following instances.
There may be other side-effects from the bundling of files that are not addressed here.
The regex does no lookbehind/around to see if your include/require is commented out!
If your code jumps in and out of PHP mode and blurts out HTML, all bets are off
Managing the inclusion of autoloaded classes is beyond this snippet.

Please report any glitches and edge cases. Feel free to develop and (freely) share.

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Answer