I’ve been recently playing around with Phabricator to plan a deployment for the company and one of the big piece that comes along with Phabricator is the Arcanist Command-Line interface (CLI) that allows to interact with your Version Control System (VCS) like Git, Mercurial or SVN.

This tool comes as a “beta” for Windows and is announced to be made to work with git-bash, the shell-style console based on mingw64 installed with Git for Windows.

How to install Arcanist on Windows

Installing Arcanist requires a bit of work, you will need:

PHP
Git
Arcanist
libphutil

PHP

Installing PHP on windows in pretty straightforward, the method is up to you but I like using Chocolatey which sums it up to:

choco install php

Then you need to enable the PHP Curl extension, in the PHP Directory:

Rename or copy php.ini-development to php.ini
Set the extension_dir to your PHP ext folder (php\ext)
Uncomment the ;extension=php_curl.dll by removing the ;

Finally make sure the PHP bin is in your PATH Environment variable, then in a new console you can check that PHP is found coorectly:

$ php -version
PHP 5.6.3 (cli) (built: Nov 12 2014 17:19:35)
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies

Git

Git for Windows is a simple installer as well, again you may use Chocolatey:

choco install git

Again, make sure it works and try your new git-bash around:

$ git --version
git version 1.9.5.msysgit.0

Arcanist and libphutil

Arcanist and libphutil need to be cloned from a git repository (already using git!), so create a directory for those tools (e.g. c:/utils) then clone the 2 repositories inside:

$ cd c:/utils 
$ git clone https://github.com/phacility/libphutil.git
$ git clone https://github.com/phacility/arcanist.git

You should then have the 2 directories in your utils folder. Then add your arcanist/bin folder to your PATH environment variable (just like PHP).

Finally you can check that everything works from you Git-Bash:

$ php --version
PHP 5.6.3 (cli) (built: Nov 12 2014 17:19:35)
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies

$ git --version
git version 1.9.5.msysgit.0

$ arc
Usage Exception: No command provided. Try `arc help`.

Adding Tab Completion

One useful thing to have is tab completion: pressing tab will tell you what are your possibilities with Arcanist, but this feature is not set-up by default and requires a small change.

First find you .bash_profile file, which should be under:

C:\Users\XXXXX\.bash_profile

If the file does not exists, you may create it using your console (Git-bash for example):

$ touch c:\Users\xxxx\.bash_profile

Then assuming you cloned Arcanist in C:\utils\, add the following line to it:

source "C:\utils\arcanist\resources\shell\bash-completion"

You can then start a new git-bash console, go into a git repository (arcanist folder for example), then type “arc “ + TAB. You should see something like:

$ arc
alias           diff            lint            tasks
amend           download        linters         time
anoid           export          list            todo
backout         feature         paste           unit
branch          flag            patch           upgrade
browse          get-config      revert          upload
close           help            set-config      version
close-revision  land            start           which
cover           liberate        stop

Fixing Ansi colors

It seems that for some people the Ansi color is not escaped properly and thus appear like this:

$ arc
←[1mUsage Exception:←[m No command provided. Try `arc help`.

This has been reporter here: T5724 There are two ways to fix this:

Removing the Ansi colors:

The simple and quickest solution is to remove the Ansi coloring completely. Arcanist will only send colors if your TERM is compatible so you can:

Remove the Terminal type completely:

unset TERM

Or Set to another Terminal type:

export TERM=xterm

The default TERM value for Git-bash should be cygwin.

Hack to keep the Ansi colors:

I really wanted to keep the Ansi coloring so I realised the following:

The issue lies in the PHP output and not in the Terminal, so passing the result through a terminal command would solve the color:

$ arc
←[1mUsage Exception:←[m No command provided. Try `arc help`.
$ arc|cat
Usage Exception: No command provided. Try `arc help`.

One hack to fix it is to customize your bash profile with a little function that will override the behavior of the arc command:

function arc(){
    command arc $@|cat
}

EDIT: More recent versions of phputils use the error output as well which needs an extra addition in order to be caught by our cat:

function arc(){
    command arc $@ 2>&1|cat
}

Completion error on non-git folders:

Finally I noticed than trying to tab-complete on a non-git folder would output the following:

$ arc sh.exe": --trace: command not found

^[[1mException^[[m
...

Which is the result of the following error:

$ arc shell-complete
Exception
Argument 1 passed to idx() must be of the type array, null given, called in C:\u
tils\arcanist\src\workflow\ArcanistWorkflow.php on line 618 and defined
(Run with `--trace` for a full exception trace.)

To get rid of that I modified the bash-completion file (the one added as source) to check for an error on this line specifically

...
OPTS=$(echo | arc shell-complete --current ${COMP_CWORD} -- ${COMP_WORDS[@]})

if [[ $OPTS == *"ArcanistWorkflow.php on line 618"* ]]; then
    return 0
fi
...

Although this is a quick hack that isn’t so clean, it will probably break itself if the file is updated which isn’t a bad thing actually.

Some useful links

Posted with : Windows , Phabricator

Using Arcanist CLI tool with Git-Bash

Using the Phabricator Arcanist CLI tool on Windows with ANSI colors and auto-completion