Installed standards
By following the instructions for installing PHPCS for WordPress VIP, the dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer Composer plugin package will also be installed in the background.
The presence of the dealerdirect/phpcodesniffer-composer-installer Composer plugin package allows standards to be automatically registered with PHPCS. This eliminates the need to register standards separately when new standards are added.
A list of installed standards can be returned by running the command phpcs -i. After following the instructions for installing PHPCS globally or installing PHPCS at the project level, the returned standards should match this example:
$ phpcs -i The installed coding standards are MySource, PEAR, PSR1, PSR2, PSR12, Squiz, Zend, WordPress-VIP-Go, WordPressVIPMinimum, Modernize, NormalizedArrays, Universal, PHPCSUtils, VariableAnalysis, WordPress, WordPress-Core, WordPress-Docs and WordPress-Extra
Note
The WordPress-VIP standard should not appear in the returned list. This standard has been deprecated, is not used in the latest version of VIPCS, and has been removed completely from WordPressCS 2.x.
The current VIP-Coding-Standards (VIPCS) 3.x release requires at minimum WordPress-Coding-Standards (WordPressCS) 3.x. Refer to the README for the exact minimum version required.
Last updated: December 31, 2025