Installing Arcanist

Arcanist is meant to be installed on your local machine or development server -- whatever machine you're editing code on. It runs on:

Linux;
Other operating systems which are pretty similar to Linux, or which Linux is pretty similar to;
FreeBSD, a fine operating system held in great esteem by many;
Mac OS X (see Arcanist User Guide: Mac OS X); and
Windows (see Arcanist User Guide: Windows).
Arcanist is written in PHP, so you need to install the PHP CLI first if you don't already have it. Arcanist should run on PHP 5.2 and newer. If you don't have PHP installed, you can download it from http://www.php.net/.

To install Arcanist, pick an install directory and clone the code from GitHub:

some_install_path/ $ git clone git://github.com/facebook/libphutil.git
some_install_path/ $ git clone git://github.com/facebook/arcanist.git
This should leave you with a directory structure like this

some_install_path/    # Wherever you chose to install it.
  arcanist/           # Arcanist-specific code and libraries.
  libphutil/          # A shared library Arcanist depends upon.
Now add some_install_path/arcanist/bin/ to your PATH environment variable. When you type "arc", you should see something like this:

Usage Exception: No command provided. Try 'arc help'.
If you get that far, you've done things correctly. If you get an error or have trouble getting this far, see these detailed guides:

On Windows: Arcanist User Guide: Windows
On Mac OS X: Arcanist User Guide: Mac OS X
You can later upgrade Arcanist and libphutil to the latest versions with arc upgrade:

$ arc upgrade
Installing Arcanist