What's on this page

• Available platforms
• Get started
• Secure by design
• Good to know

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 --version

Then create and build a website as usual:

./cecil new:site my-website
./cecil build my-website

On 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/Cecil

Good 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-update command is not available: download the binary again to update it.
• The serve command relies on the PHP built-in web server, so it still requires a local PHP executable. Without PHP, run build and 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.

Release notes on GitHub