report-checkstyle arg is not creating parent direcories and failes when missing

[MakerTim]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

when using the report-checkstyle arg, it failes when the parent directory does not exists
this is odd behaviour compared to the other tools, like phpmd and phpstan -> they create parent directories when missing.

Describe the solution you'd like

could we do the same, create parent directory when missing?

Additional context (optional)

phpstan

• I have read the Contribution Guidelines and this is not a support question.
• I intend to create a pull request to implement this feature.

[rodrigoprimo]

Before discussing the proposal itself, I'd like to confirm my understanding of the request.

You are running PHPCS with something like phpcs --report-checkstyle=path/to/report.xml test.php, where path/to doesn't exist. PHPCS exits with ERROR: The specified checkstyle report file path "path/to/report.xml" points to a non-existent directory. Your request is for PHPCS to create the missing parent directories automatically instead of erroring out. Is that correct?

A couple of observations:

1. If this is ever accepted, the change should apply to all --report-*=FILE arguments, not only --report-checkstyle.

2. The error message was added intentionally in Reporter throws exception when it can't create a file squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer#1992. I lean toward considering the current behavior a deliberate choice and I prefer it. My main concern with auto-creating the directory is that a typo in the path would silently create an unexpected directory, where the current behavior catches the mistake immediately.

3. Could you point to the specific PHPStan and PHPMD options you had in mind that behave the way you are describing? Concrete examples would help frame the comparison.

That said, this is just my opinion as a contributor. @jrfnl may see this differently.

[MakerTim]

I also agree that if this behavior were accepted, it should not be limited to --report-checkstyle, but should apply consistently to all --report-*=FILE arguments. I only realized after looking into the code that this reporting abstraction exists (and didn't knew about the other options), so my intention is definitely to make the file-output behavior consistent across the board.

I understand the concern about typos silently creating unexpected directories. My main motivation is consistency with the wider PHP tooling ecosystem, especially in CI/CD setups. In my case, I changed the order of the tools in CI — and later made them run asynchronously — which exposed the difference in behavior. When PHPCS/PHPCBF runs before the other tools, it fails because the output directory does not exist yet, while other tools create the required parent directories themselves.

The arguments in phpstan that creates the directory when needed is in the tmpDir argument
And in phpmd it is in the report-checkstyle argument

Of course, running mkdir -p ... before PHPCS/PHPCBF is a workaround to have no issues. My argument is more about making the behavior predictable and consistent across PHP developer tooling, so the success of a CI run does not depend on tool ordering or whether another tool happened to create the directory first.
So if the answer is: run mkdir beforehand, that is fine. Just noticed the inconsistency and would hope that we can make it more consistent.

[rodrigoprimo]

Thanks for the additional details, @MakerTim. That is helpful. We should hear from the maintainer of this project, when they are available, with a decision on whether they think the behavior should change.

[jrfnl]

Thank you both for this discussion. I'm concerned about the security implications (and therefore the amount of security guarding which would need to be put in place) if this proposal were to be accepted.

Have you given this any thought ?

P.S.: consistency with other tooling is never a valid argument for a feature. The feature should have enough merits on its own (and little or no detriment) to not need that kind of argumentation.