Cecil is now available as a standalone binary
Until now, running Cecil required PHP 8.3+ and a few extensions on your machine. Since Cecil 9.11.0, Cecil is also distributed as a standalone binary: a single executable file that embeds PHP and the required extensions. No PHP installation needed!
Available platforms
Binaries are attached to each GitHub release:
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| Linux x64 | cecil-linux-x64 |
| Linux ARM64 | cecil-linux-arm64 |
| macOS Intel | cecil-macos-x64 |
| macOS Apple Silicon | cecil-macos-arm64 |
| Windows x64 | cecil-windows-x64.exe |
Get started
For example, on Linux x64:
curl -Lo cecil https://github.com/Cecilapp/Cecil/releases/latest/download/cecil-linux-x64
chmod +x cecil
./cecil --versionThen create and build a website as usual:
./cecil new:site my-website
./cecil build my-websiteOn macOS, binaries are not signed yet: remove the quarantine attribute before the first run with xattr -d com.apple.quarantine cecil.
Secure by design
Binaries are built, tested and published automatically by the release workflow, with phpacker. Each release provides SHA-256 checksums (cecil-binaries.sha256) and a build provenance attestation you can verify with the GitHub CLI:
gh attestation verify cecil --repo Cecilapp/CecilGood to know
The standalone binary is ideal to try Cecil quickly, or to build a website in a CI environment without PHP. However, a few limitations apply:
- Images are processed with GD: Imagick and libvips are not available.
- The
self-updatecommand is not available: download the binary again to update it. - The
servecommand relies on the PHP built-in web server, so it still requires a local PHP executable. Without PHP, runbuildand serve the output directory with another web server.
The cecil.phar file, package managers and Composer remain available and fully supported.
See the installation documentation for more details.