Attributes—akaannotations—inPHP8

Attributes in PHP 8

As of PHP 8, we'll be able to use attributes. The goal of these attributes, also known as annotations in many other languages, is to add meta data to classes, methods, variables and what not; in a structured way.

The concept of attributes isn't new at all, we've been using docblocks to simulate their behaviour for years now. With the addition of attributes though, we now have a first-class citizen in the language to represent this kind of meta data, instead of having to manually parse docblocks.

So what do they look like? How do we make custom attributes? Are there any caveats? Those are the questions that will be answered in this post. Let's dive in!

First things first, here's what attribute would look like in the wild: