libphutil Overview

Arcanist Technical Documentation (overview)

This document provides a high-level introduction to libphutil.

Overview

libphutil (pronounced as "lib-futile", like the English word futile) is a collection of PHP utility classes and functions. Most code in the library is general-purpose, and makes it easier to build applications in PHP.

libphutil is principally the shared library for Phabricator and its CLI Arcanist, but is suitable for inclusion in other projects. In particular, some of the classes provided in this library vastly improve the state of common operations in PHP, like executing system commands.

libphutil is developed and maintained by Phacility. Some of the code in this library was originally developed at Facebook, and parts of it appear in the core libraries for http://www.facebook.com/.

Loading libphutil

To include libphutil in another project, include the src/__phutil_library_init__.php file:

require_once 'path/to/libphutil/src/__phutil_library_init__.php';

This loads global functions and registers an autoload function with spl_autoload_register(), so you can also use classes.

Major Components

Some of the major components of libphutil are:

• Core Utilities: a collection of useful functions like ipull() which simplify common data manipulation;
• Filesystem: classes like Filesystem which provide a strict API for filesystem access and throw exceptions on failure, making it easier to write robust code which interacts with files;
• Command Execution: libphutil provides a powerful system command primitive in ExecFuture which makes it far easier to write command-line scripts which execute system commands (see Command Execution);
• xsprintf(): allows you to define sprintf()-style functions which use custom conversions; and
• Library System: an introspectable, inventoried system for organizing PHP code and managing dependencies, supported by static analysis.

Extending and Contributing

Information on extending and contributing to libphutil is available in the Phabricator documentation:

• To get started as a contributor, see Contributor Introduction.