[SOLVED] How to exclude everything except some directories from PHP Code Sniffer inspections in .phpcs.xml?

How to exclude everything except some directories from PHP Code Sniffer inspections in .phpcs.xml?

I would like to exclude everything except some directories from PHP Code Sniffer inspection in my project. Something similar like git repo exclusions with .gitignore

I had the idea that regex with negative lookahead could be used with <exclude-pattern>. I tried:

<exclude-pattern>^(?!wp-content\/plugins\/customplugin\/*$|wp-content\/themes\/customtheme\/*$).+</exclude-pattern>

Consequently, I expected PHPCS to only scan the wp-content/plugins/customplugin/ and wp-content/themes/customtheme/. Unfortunately it doesn't work:

Registering sniffs in the Project standard... DONE (138 sniffs registered)
Creating file list... DONE (0 files in queue)

How to achieve this in the right way?

Solution

To achieve the intended goal, we must modify the regular expression:

<exclude-pattern>^(?!.*\/wp-content\/plugins\/customplugin|.*\/wp-content\/themes\/customtheme).*</exclude-pattern>

Note that it may be possible to resolve this issue in a different way in the future thanks to this ticket in the CodeSniffer repository