[tip] How to migrate from PHPExcel to PHPSpreadsheet

[TomasVotruba]

I want to share a tip for people stuck on deprecated PHPExcel. It might take < 30 minutes to migrate to PHPSpreadsheet now.

I maintain @rectorphp open-source project, that handles instant migrations with AST (known in nikic/php-parser and PHPStan tools)

Recently I got into project that uses PHPExcel, read the migration README and made a migration set.

I wrote post about it: How to Migrate From PHPExcel to PHPSpreadsheet with Rector in 30 minutes

---

tl;dr;

composer require rector/rector --dev

# this command creates rector.php
vendor/bin/rector init

Add PHPOfficeSetList set to rector.php

declare(strict_types=1);

use Rector\Config\RectorConfig;
use Rector\PHPOffice\Set\PHPOfficeSetList;

return static function (RectorConfig $rectorConfig): void {
    $rectorConfig->sets([
        PHPOfficeSetList::PHPEXCEL_TO_PHPSPREADSHEET
    ]);
};

And you're ready to go 😉

[PowerKiKi]

This is great thank you for sharing. I would like to integrate this info official documentation. Do you have any opinion on how to do that? Replace everything with Rector? Or replace only our regexp tool and keep description of other changes?

[TomasVotruba]

Replace everything with Rector?

👍 That would the best. I tried to cover all the changes described in the migration guide.

If you find any mistake or would like to add more changes to automate, let me know. It should be doable 😉

[PowerKiKi]

@TomasVotruba could you please edit your blog post and replace all references from:

https://github.com/PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet/blob/master/docs/topics/migration-from-PHPExcel.md

to:

https://github.com/PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet/blob/50d78ce7898ee3a540cefd9693085b3636e578e6/docs/topics/migration-from-PHPExcel.md

So the old manual way is still somewhat accessible.

[TomasVotruba]

Sure, that's a good idea. There you go: rectorphp/getrector-com@0596ce4

If you share a tweet about this, just mention @rectorphp and I'll retweet it.

[jeanmobayed]

Is it possible to use this with Codeigniter 3? It seems like there's no way to make it work given how CodeIgniter controller and model classes are loaded. Sadly there's no information on how to migrate manually either, so I'm stuck with PHPExcel.

[PowerKiKi]

You can have a look at the old doc here: https://github.com/PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet/blob/1.12.0/docs/topics/migration-from-PHPExcel.md

And if you need the old semi-automated migration tool, you can temporarily install v1.12.0, do the migration, and then update to latest version.