PHP UML Generator

There's also the PHP UML tool available from pear.

PHP_UML:

• Can generate UML/XMI files in version 1.4, or in version 2.1 (logical, component, and deployment views)
• Can generate an API documentation in HTML format
• Can generate PHP code (code skeleton) from a given XMI file
• Can convert UML/XMI content from version 1.4 to version 2.1

Install it on the command line via:

$ pear install pear/php_uml

(This used to be $ pear install pear/php_uml-alpha but the package has since gone stable.)

Generate your xmi:

$ phpuml -o project.xmi

I strongly recommend BOUML which:

• is extremely fast (fastest UML tool ever created, check out benchmarks),
• has rock solid PHP import and export support (also supports C++, Java, Python)
• is multiplatform (Linux, Windows, other OSes),
• is full featured, impressively intensively developed (look at development history, it's hard to believe that such fast progress is possible).
• supports plugins, has modular architecture (this allows user contributions, looks like BOUML community is forming up)

the best (Windows) software i have found to do PHP and UML is Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect. besides a pletora of features, it supports the following for PHP:

• Reverse engineer object oriented PHP into UML class diagrams
• Generate PHP class definitions from UML class diagrams
• Synchronize changes made in a UML class into the corresponding PHP class definition
• Synchronize changes made in a PHP class definition into the corresponding UML class
• Create UML sequence diagrams to show what PHP classes use and how they are used
• Produce detailed documentation of your PHP code in standard RTF and HTML format
• Perform code engineering on models to generate base PHP pages.

not free ($199), but definitely worth the money.

Have you tried Autodia yet? Last time I tried it it wasn't perfect, but it was good enough.

There's also php2xmi. You have to do a bit of manual work, but it generates all the classes, so all you have to do is to drag them into a classdiagram in Umbrello.

Otherwise, generating a diagram with the use of reflection and graphviz, is fairly simple. I have a snippet over here, that you can use as a starting point.

In theory you can use PhpStorm to visualise your classes using UML. The generation is not really great but you can effectively refactor stuff and again, at least preview parents, implementations, constants, attributes, methods and their visibility in a nice way.

Situation

I want to visualise a communication between already existing components to a colleague.

Process using PHPStorm

https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2017/09/uml-diagrams-in-phpstorm-2017-2/

Advantages

• Nice UI, final diagram.
• Able to refactor code from a diagram.
• Able to add notes.
• The class diagram symbolises private/public properties, constructors, methods nicely.

Disadvantages

• No support for PHP 7.
• Painfully to use. Can't resize the generated boxes.
• When adding a new relation, the previous ones get randomly lost :O wtf?
• Restarting PhpStorm destroys the diagrams
• Changed my mind, impossible to use relations

Result

Anyway, after some painful hour of work I was only able to generate unrelated boxes and had to use additional program to link relations. Really bad. But I believe once they make it work properly it will be a great feature because as the code changes, the diagrams would be automatically updated!

For now, don't use PhpStorm for UML diagrams.

You can use Visual Paradigm for UML. This might not be the best paid (it's US$699) product, just as an option if anyone would like to try. It can create class diagram from PHP and vice versa, and not only PHP, there's a bunch of language you can choose such as C#, C++, Ruby, Java, VB.NET, Python, Objective C, Perl, etc. There's also a trial you can check on.