Before going to Rector 1.0, we need to refocus solely on PHP files. In this release, we're leaving a not-so-well-known feature that could handle some changes in configs and templates.
Like any other tools like ECS, PHPStan, PHP-CS-Fixer, PHPUnit, Pest, etc., Rector focuses on working with PHP files. Yet, in some cases, it could change YAML, TWIG, or files too. While using PHP classes in templates is a bad practice, it cannot be avoided like in Symfony configs.
That's why I added a "special file processor" that could handle some non-php files too. This is a not-so-known feature that worked in quite a magic way.
# this could process non-PHP files
bin/rector config src
# this could not
bin/rector src
# This is skipped
use App\SomeType;
class: SomeType
The problem is Rector is built on AST to work with any form of PHP class naming - it's 100 % reliable and can handle whatever aliases.
The magic mentioned above was hidden deep, leading to unexpected cases - some classes are renamed but are not.
Instead, these files should be skipped entirely, and Rector handles PHP files only. This will show the same behavior as other CLI tools mention above and make you handle non-PHP files yourself in a consistent and aware way.
In Rector 0.17.3 we removed NonPhpFileProcessor and NonPhpRectorInterface - see PR 4761.
The FileProcessorInterface designed to support these magic changes is now deprecated and should be moved away from.
The community usage is very rare - as far as we know, there is only single package using those. But we want to plan ahead and give you time to adjust.
On the other hand, this shows potential for a standalone tool. In the same way PHPStan core does not handle Blade templates but only pure PHP syntax, but there is an wrapper package, the Rector will handle pure PHP and allow reliable extensions to grow.
Happy coding!