Installation

deskhand operates on Laravel projects from the outside — it is not a project dependency. It carries its own dependencies, so it never relies on the target project’s autoloader.

Requirements

• PHP 8.3+ — this is the PHP on your machine (deskhand is a global CLI), not the version your project pins.
• Git and Composer on your PATH.
• macOS or Linux. Windows is not supported.
• A MySQL client — only if you use --db=mysql.

deskhand checks the running PHP version at startup and exits with a clear message (never a stack trace) if it is below 8.3.

Global Composer tool

composer global require albertoarena/deskhand

Make sure Composer’s global bin directory is on your PATH (commonly ~/.composer/vendor/bin or ~/.config/composer/vendor/bin), then:

deskhand --version

Standalone PHAR

Download the deskhand.phar attached to the latest GitHub Release, then make it executable:

chmod +x deskhand.phar
./deskhand.phar --version

# optional: install it onto your PATH
mv deskhand.phar /usr/local/bin/deskhand

Next steps

• Quickstart — provision your first isolated worktree.
• Configuration — the deskhand.yaml reference (zero-config works too).