Early Access Program

The PhpStorm 2023.2 Early Access Program Is Open

The Early Access Program (EAP) for the next major PhpStorm release starts today!

In this first EAP build, you’ll get improvements for generics in PHP and a bunch of other user experience enhancements.

If you’re unfamiliar with how our EAP works, here’s a quick recap:

  • We publish new EAP builds every week and showcase upcoming features.
  • EAP builds are free to use and don’t require a license.
  • You can install the EAP version alongside your stable version of PhpStorm, so there is no need to uninstall it.
  • The easiest way to get EAP builds and keep both your stable and EAP versions up to date is with the Toolbox App.
  • Download builds from the EAP page or receive them automatically in the IDE by selecting Check IDE Updates for the Early Access Program under Settings/Preferences | Appearance & Behavior | System Settings | Updates.

Let’s look at what’s new in the first EAP build of PhpStorm 2023.2.


Generics in PHP

New Rename generic refactoring

Press Shift+F6 to invoke renaming of a generic type. PhpStorm will automatically update the name throughout the whole codebase.

Alternatively, you can press Ctrl+T and choose the Rename menu option.

Support for the `static` type in generics

One of the things that was missing and was highly anticipated was support for static references in generic templates. 

It has finally been fixed in this release, and we’re working to make PHP’s generics support the best possible.

Xdebug: download and install extension on Windows

Configuring Xdebug can be hard, so we’ve tried to improve it with every release.

When starting the debugger for the first time, if PhpStorm cannot connect to Xdebug, then the IDE will offer downloading the extension and installing it locally by updating `php.in`.

So far, this works only for Windows. If you are on macOS, then use Homebrew, and for Linux, use your packet manager of choice. 

User experience

Reworked hamburger menu in the main toolbar on Windows and Linux

We’ve refined the behavior of the hamburger menu in the new UI, located in the main toolbar for Windows and Linux. Once you click on the menu icon, the elements now appear horizontally over the toolbar.

Also, there’s now an option to turn this menu into a separate toolbar. To do so, go to View | Appearance | Main menu as a Separate Toolbar.


That’s all for the first build! We’ll keep you informed about any upcoming changes in the weekly EAP blog posts.

The complete list of updates in this build is available in the release notes.

Please report any problems you find to our issue tracker, or leave a comment below.

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