Running a scan

Nothing needs configuring before the first scan. Install the plugin, run one, and read the report.

From the control panel

Microscope adds a top-level Microscope item to the control panel navigation with four screens:

• Dashboard — the current score and grade, the per-area breakdown, the highest-priority findings and a history chart of previous scans.
• Scans — every stored scan, and the report for each one.
• Checks — the catalogue, with a switch for each check.
• Settings — scanning, scheduling, notifications and housekeeping. Admin-only.

Click Run a scan on the dashboard or the scans screen. The scan is pushed onto Craft’s queue rather than run inside the request, so a slow database probe can never time out the page; the screen polls for the result and shows the report as soon as it lands.

From the command line

php craft microscope/scan/run

This runs the scan in the foreground, stores it like any other, and prints a summary. Add --verbose to print the remediation for every finding rather than just the headlines, or --category to run one area:

php craft microscope/scan/run --verbose
php craft microscope/scan/run --category=templates

The full command list is on Console commands.

Which one should you trust?

For five of the six areas it makes no difference. For PHP, it does.

A CLI scan reads the CLI PHP configuration. That is a different php.ini from the one PHP-FPM serves your site with on most hosts: usually a much larger (or unlimited) memory_limit, no max_execution_time, and very often no OPcache at all. A CLI scan that reports “OPcache is disabled” may be describing a perfectly well-configured web server.

Microscope records the SAPI on every scan — you will see cli or fpm-fcgi in the report header — and the PHP findings say which runtime they measured. But if you want the PHP area to describe the site your visitors get, start the scan from the control panel.

Reading a report

A report opens with the overall score and grade, then a card per area. Each area card carries its own score out of 100 and a count of things to look at, so you know where to start before reading a single finding.

Findings are ordered by severity and collapsed to their headline. Expanding one shows:

• Found and Recommended — the measurement and the target.
• Why it matters — what the setting actually costs.
• How to fix it — the steps, with config snippets you can copy.
• Where — for findings with multiple occurrences, a table of templates, tables or fields.

Passing checks are reported too, not left as silence — a report that says “OPcache is configured correctly” is more useful than one that merely fails to mention it.

Handing the report on

Every stored scan has a print view and a PDF. Both are standalone documents with the remediation expanded, which is what makes them worth sending to a client or a host.