Install

There is nothing to add to your project. No plugin to register, no Composer entry, no ESLint config to extend. The analysis is a single static binary: about 6 MB on disk and roughly 1 MB to download, with every language built in.

npx

npx bonsai-lint --over 15 src/

Installs nothing permanently and needs no Node runtime for the analysis itself; Node only launches the binary. This is the cheapest way to try it, and a perfectly reasonable way to run it in CI.

npm

npm install -D bonsai-lint

Pins a version in the project. The package fetches the prebuilt binary for your platform on install; nothing is compiled.

Homebrew

brew install ryckakas/tap/bonsai-lint

macOS and Linux. It lives in a personal tap because homebrew-core does not accept prebuilt binaries.

Cargo

cargo install bonsai-lint

Builds from source. Needs a Rust toolchain; everything else here does not.

Script

curl -LsSf https://github.com/ryckakas/bonsai-lint/releases/latest/download/bonsai-lint-installer.sh | sh

Downloads the release binary directly. There is a PowerShell equivalent for Windows.

What you did not have to do

Worth stating plainly, because it is the main practical difference from the alternatives:

• No language runtime. Scanning PHP needs no PHP; scanning TypeScript needs no tsc and no node_modules. The parsers are compiled in.
• No plugin versions to keep in step. It is not a PHPStan extension or an ESLint plugin, so there is no compatibility matrix between it and anything else.
• Your code is never executed. Analysis is syntax-only: no autoloader, no reflection, no module resolution. That is why it is safe to point at third-party or untrusted source.

Next: your first run.