Your job description already tells us what a great candidate looks like — so let's use it. Paste your PHP developer JD below and we'll automatically generate a coding test tailored to the skills, frameworks, and seniority level it describes. Relevant questions, zero setup, ready in seconds.
Before you start screening and testing your candidates, you should be aware of the PHP basics. Below you will find the list of essential skills which every skilled PHP developer should have. And not only that, we will show you how to test these skills on a scale, so you can pre-screen and vet tens or hundreds of candidates.
Object-oriented programming is the foundation of modern PHP. It organizes code into classes and objects that bundle data and behavior together, using principles like encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and abstraction. Every major PHP framework (Laravel, Symfony) is built on OOP, so a developer who understands it writes code that is reusable, maintainable, and easy to scale.
Ask candidates to model a small class hierarchy with shared and overridden behavior.
Example Question:
“Write an abstract Payment class with a process() method, then create CardPayment and PayPalPayment classes that implement it.”
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Laravel is the most widely used PHP framework, providing routing, an expressive ORM (Eloquent), middleware, queues, and a powerful templating engine out of the box. Most professional PHP projects run on a framework, so familiarity with Laravel signals that a developer can be productive on real-world codebases quickly and follow established conventions.
Ask candidates to build a small CRUD feature using Eloquent and a controller.
Example Coding Question:
“Create an Eloquent model and controller that lists all products and lets you filter them by category.”
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Almost every PHP application is data-driven, so developers must be able to query databases efficiently and safely. Using PDO with prepared statements protects against SQL injection, while a solid grasp of joins, indexing, and query optimization keeps applications fast as data grows.
Assign a task that involves fetching and filtering data securely from a database.
Example Question:
“Using PDO and prepared statements, write a query that fetches all users with a given role and orders them by creation date.”
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Modern PHP backends commonly expose REST APIs that power frontends, mobile apps, and third-party integrations. Developers need to map URLs to the right handlers, return correct HTTP status codes, and produce clean JSON responses. Well-designed routing and API structure are crucial for maintainable, predictable applications.
Provide a task to build an endpoint that returns data as JSON and handles missing resources.
Example Question:
“Implement a route GET /api/products/{id} that returns the product as JSON, or responds with a 404 if it does not exist.”
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