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Installation and Autocomplete

Installation

We provide several ways to install Castor, depending on your needs:

With the installer

Tip

This is the recommended way to install Castor on Linux and macOS. It requires PHP >= 8.1.

curl "https://castor.jolicode.com/install" | bash

As a phar

You can download the latest release of Castor as a phar file from the releases page.

Note

You can also download the latest version by browsing the build page and selecting the last build.

We provide different phar for Linux / MacOS / Windows architectures to offer lighter phar files. Download the correct one and make it available in your shell.

Tip

On Linux, it's better to install the phar with the installer as it handles everything for you.

curl "https://github.com/jolicode/castor/releases/latest/download/castor.linux-amd64.phar" -Lfso $HOME/.local/bin/castor && \
    chmod u+x $HOME/.local/bin/castor && \
    castor --version || \
    (echo "Could not install castor. Is the target directory writeable?" && (exit 1))

Caution

When using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), you should still use the Windows phar instead of the Linux phar.

Tip

On Linux, it's better to install the phar with the installer as it handles everything for you.

curl "https://github.com/jolicode/castor/releases/latest/download/castor.linux-arm64.phar" -Lfso $HOME/.local/bin/castor && \
    chmod u+x $HOME/.local/bin/castor && \
    castor --version || \
    (echo "Could not install castor. Is the target directory writeable?" && (exit 1))

Tip

On macOS, it's better to install the phar with the installer as it handles everything for you.

curl "https://github.com/jolicode/castor/releases/latest/download/castor.darwin-arm64.phar" -Lfso /usr/local/bin/castor && \
    chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/castor && \
    castor --version || \
    (echo "Could not install castor. Is the target directory writeable?" && (exit 1))

Tip

On macOS, it's better to install the phar with the installer as it handles everything for you.

curl "https://github.com/jolicode/castor/releases/latest/download/castor.darwin-amd64.phar" -Lfso /usr/local/bin/castor && \
    chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/castor && \
    castor --version || \
    (echo "Could not install castor. Is the target directory writeable?" && (exit 1))
curl.exe "https://github.com/jolicode/castor/releases/latest/download/castor.windows-amd64.phar" -Lso C:\<a directory in your PATH>\castor

As a static binary

If you don't have PHP installed on your system, Castor can also be installed with a static binary that embeds PHP, so it can be run anywhere. The static binaries are available for Linux and MacOS only.

You can download the binaries in the releases page:

curl "https://github.com/jolicode/castor/releases/latest/download/castor.linux-amd64" -Lfso $HOME/.local/bin/castor && \
    chmod u+x $HOME/.local/bin/castor && \
    castor --version || \
    (echo "Could not install castor. Is the target directory writeable?" && (exit 1))
curl "https://github.com/jolicode/castor/releases/latest/download/castor.linux-arm64" -Lfso $HOME/.local/bin/castor && \
    chmod u+x $HOME/.local/bin/castor && \
    castor --version || \
    (echo "Could not install castor. Is the target directory writeable?" && (exit 1))
curl "https://github.com/jolicode/castor/releases/latest/download/castor.darwin-arm64" -Lfso /usr/local/bin/castor && \
    chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/castor && \
    castor --version || \
    (echo "Could not install castor. Is the target directory writeable?" && (exit 1))
curl "https://github.com/jolicode/castor/releases/latest/download/castor.darwin-amd64" -Lfso /usr/local/bin/castor && \
    chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/castor && \
    castor --version || \
    (echo "Could not install castor. Is the target directory writeable?" && (exit 1))

Globally with Composer

Warning

Installing Castor globally with Composer is not recommended. Installing CLI tools globally with Composer may easily lead to conflicts in the "global" project.

You can install Castor globally with Composer:

composer global require jolicode/castor

Then make sure that the Composer global bin directory is in your PATH.

Note

The global Composer path may vary depending on your operating system.

You can run the following command to determine it:

composer config --list --global | grep -F "[home]"

# It may looks like this on some Linux systems:
# [home] /home/<your_username>/.config/composer
# Or like this too:
# [home] /home/<your_username>/.composer

You can optionally replace /home/<your_username> with the Unix $HOME environment variable. Now, append /vendor/bin to that path to get the Composer global bin directory to add to your PATH:

export PATH="$HOME/.config/composer/vendor/bin:$PATH"

Any binary globally installed with Composer will now work everywhere.

Manually with git

You'll need to clone the repository and run composer install to install the project. Then create a symlink to the castor file in your PATH.

cd $HOME/somewhere
git clone git@github.com:jolicode/castor.git
cd castor
composer install
ln -s $PWD/bin/castor $HOME/.local/bin/castor

In a Github Action

Castor can also be installed in a Github Action by using the action shivammathur/setup-php@v2 and specifying castor in the tools option. This will configure PHP with the right version but also make castor available in the next steps. Here is an example:

jobs:
  my-job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Setup PHP
        uses: shivammathur/setup-php@v2
        with:
          php-version: '8.1'
          tools: castor

      - name: Run castor "hello" task
        run: castor hello

Autocomplete

Castor provides a built-in autocomplete to ease its usage in shell.

See the dedicated documentation to see how to install it, and also how to autocomplete your arguments.

Stubs

The first time you run castor, it will create a .castor.stub.php at the root directory of your project (where your castor.php is). This file contains some definition of classes and methods from Castor and some of its dependencies.

This is useful when you install Castor from a PHAR, from a global composer install, etc. Without it, your IDE would complain that it does not understand some classes and would not provide any autocompletion in your castor files.

We suggest you to add this file to your .gitignore to not version it in git. Castor will automatically update this file the first time you run Castor after you install or update it.