PHPStorm Stuck Re-indexing

Today I had PHPStorm open and not sure what I did, but for some reason it was stuck in a loop of re-indexing files.

It wasn’t a new project and I hadn’t updated any of the files since the last time I opened PHPStorm so it didn’t make any sense.  It also was not following its normal patter of indexing the entire directory at once.  It appeared to quickly start, index one file, then stop, then repeat and after hours it never stopped.  I must have bugged it out unintentionally while opening or closing something too quickly is all I can figure.

I tried restarting PHPStorm but that didn’t work.  Next I tried rebooting my computer, again that didn’t solve the issue.  After a few Google searches I found a solution.  It didn’t mention how the issue first happened or any pattern to that, but there is a function in PHPStorm that will kill off the process and let it re-index correctly.

When you have PHPStorm open go to the menu bar and select File, then select Invalidate Caches and Restart.  Once doing this it will let PHPStorm know that the old index is bad, to remove it and then restart the entire index process on the particular project.  It does not clear indexes of any and all projects you have on your machine, only the one you have open while running this command.

PHPStorm is an amazing IDE code editor.  Years ago text editor, Dreamweaver and Notepad++ were my type of go to’s, but ever since finding PHPStorm I’ll never look back.