How to set the intelephense workspace for CoC phpls?

Question

I'm using coc-phpls to edit a plugin project inside a bigger project.

i.e. the dir structure is like

/var/www/example/
/var/www/example/libraries/
/var/www/example/plugins/myplugin  ← my working dir.

Because I started in myplugin/ then intelephense only looks for symbols in files within that dir; but I need it to hunt for the top of the project, i.e. /var/www/example.

I'm using local_vimrc which lets me include a .vim file from an ancestor dir. But the intelephense settings are in a json file in ~/.config/nvim/coc-settings.json

How can I set this dynamically?

I'm using neovim 0.5.0.

Answer 1

Create a .vim/coc-settings.json file in the root of your project, i.e. /var/www/example/.vim/coc-settings.json

In here you can add settings to override the global ones. Enter this:

{
  "coc.preferences.rootPatterns": [
    ".thisIsDocRoot"
  ]
}

This tells CoC to look for a .thisIsDocRoot file to determine a "workspace" dir.

Next touch /var/www/example/.thisIsDocRoot to create a file in the doc root.

Now when you edit a file in /var/www/example/plugins/myplugin CoC will:

• scan up the tree looking for .vim/coc-settings.json which it will find at the root of your project. It merges that config.
• that causes it to then look for .thisIsDocRoot, which again it finds in the root of the project.
• Intelephense now uses this to find symbols.

Note: you might also want to tell it to look in files other than .php ones, e.g. Drupal uses .module and .inc files too. To cover this, my /var/www/example/.vim/coc-settings.json file is:

{
  "coc.preferences.rootPatterns": [
    ".thisIsDocRoot"
  ],
  "intelephense.files.associations": [
    "*.php",
    "*.module",
    "*.inc"
  ],
  "cSpell.userWords": [
    "DRUPAL"
  ]
}

Red herring: Intelephense defines a config item called intelephense.environment.documentRoot. I tried putting a value in this in various coc-settings files to no avail.