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Phabricator – GitHub Alternative written in PHP used by the Wikimedia Foundation

376 points by TekMol 8y ago

lorenzfx 8y ago
Better link: https://phacility.com/phabricator/ https://phacility.com/phabricator/
- Sujan 8y ago
  Better link indeed. But also a bit scary: > Review others' code with Differential, because they can't be trusted.
  - akx 8y ago
    All of Phabricator's copy is off-color like that. Don't take it too seriously.
    - Sujan 8y ago
      Thanks, reading on confirmed that.
      - lucideer 8y ago
        It used to be much easier to tell when Phabricator was its own dedicated thing (before it got moved under the Phacility umbrella). Before it redirected, the old https://phabricator.org/ https://phabricator.org/ was basically a comedy marketing page: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014537/http://phabricator.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014537/http://phabricato... The software itself is similarly whimsical[0][1] [0] https://secure.phabricator.com/D7216 https://secure.phabricator.com/D7216 [1] https://secure.phabricator.com/rP099695ab615775e5f6d107fba406f7ea45fa7b79 https://secure.phabricator.com/rP099695ab615775e5f6d107fba40...
        seba_dos1 8y ago
        Especially check out https://secure.phabricator.com/D13641 https://secure.phabricator.com/D13641 :)
    - shoo 8y ago
      https://hackerone.com/phabricator?view_policy=true https://hackerone.com/phabricator?view_policy=true > Phabricator has more than 300,000 lines of PHP, so there are probably at least sixty or seventy million security vulnerabilities in the project. Virtually limitless wealth!
  - brobdingnagians 8y ago
    "Written in PHP so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program." - not exactly a cheery marketing point for PHP, not sure I'd want to use something written by people who have no idea how to program. But I guess that's why they have the blurb above...
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      You use the web, don't you? /s
    - krapp 8y ago
      It's PHP, you don't have to know how to program to use it, you just have to believe strongly enough.
    - mberger 8y ago
      As a PHP programmers, we've gotten so used to people shitting on our language that we've internalized it and shit on it ourselves now. I don't like it but I'll lump it for the convenient std lib.
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      It's a joke. You can't speak about PHP online without getting inundated with comments about how supposedly awful it is, and how if you like PHP you are a bad developer. They are just embracing the steriotype sarcastically.
    - vortico 8y ago
      I saw that at the bottom of https://phacility.com/phabricator/ https://phacility.com/phabricator/ and actually laughed out loud. Good to see a sense of humor and self-criticism.
  - neandrake 8y ago
    See [1], "Phabricator uses a lighthearted tone in documentation and some interfaces, and includes some features which primarily exist to add flavor or make things sillier. We use this tone because we like building software like this, and the feedback we receive about it from users is overwhelmingly (and often effusively) positive." [1] https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone/ https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone...
- kostajh 8y ago
  yes, maybe someone could change the main link on this post? As it is, the HN traffic appears to be disrupting the Wikimedia instance.
mhoad 8y ago
Wasn't this originally developed in-house in Facebook and still their go-to solution?
- samcday 8y ago
  Yep, but apparently the original author left Facebook to continue working on Phabricator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator
sdi9usu8dfu8f 8y ago
Also used by llvm: https://llvm.org/docs/Phabricator.html https://llvm.org/docs/Phabricator.html
doubleunplussed 8y ago
And it supports mercurial!
stealthmodeclan 8y ago
Also used by GHC. Glasgow Haskell Compiler
- kqr 8y ago
  ...and I remember one of the maintainers saying something along the lines of "Some of us don't even compile our code locally anymore. Sometimes you just throw code at Phab and get an email back telling you what you need to fix." I can't remember in what context that was, but ever since I heard that, I have been wanting to try Phabricator out. I guess this is as good an opportunity as any!
gitgud 8y ago
A little ironic that the source code is managed on GitHub (9k stars) https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/ https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/
- timendum 8y ago
  It's definitively a mirror, the repositories are at https://secure.phabricator.com/diffusion/ https://secure.phabricator.com/diffusion/ Phabricator: https://secure.phabricator.com/source/phabricator/ https://secure.phabricator.com/source/phabricator/ Clone via https://secure.phabricator.com/source/phabricator.git https://secure.phabricator.com/source/phabricator.git
  - gitgud 8y ago
    Yeah ok, that makes sense now
- johnnyfaehell 8y ago
  Not managed, mirrored. It's managed at https://secure.phabricator.com/ https://secure.phabricator.com/
peremen 8y ago
Also used by KDE: https://phabricator.kde.org/ https://phabricator.kde.org/
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  Yeah, I've recently contributed a few patches to KDE and it was surprisingly pleasant. Github-like approach works well where it works, but doesn't scale that well.
sqs 8y ago
Sourcegraph CEO here. We have many customers using Phabricator with our Sourcegraph Phabricator extension, which adds code intelligence (hovers, definitions, references, implementations), and search to Phab diffs. It makes reviewing code pretty magical since you have IDE-like context. The Sourcegraph extension for Phabricator is open source at https://github.com/sourcegraph/phabricator-extension https://github.com/sourcegraph/phabricator-extension. If you are considering switching from GitHub to Phabricator, definitely give this integration a try. Would love to hear feedback! Will post a demo video soon.
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  It is worth mentioning that Sourcegraph itself isn't Free / Open Source software... which makes the license of the plugin irrelevant (and in fact Phabricator's license likely forced your hand), so it's just a little bit fishy that the only license you mentioned is that of the plugin.
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    To be fair (s)he said she was the CEO and I would always assume that means paid for - "core maintainer" and I would have agreed with you.
rimliu 8y ago
You will probably not enjoy it if you like pull requests.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
thinkingemote 8y ago
Phabricator is used extensively by Wikimedia, Wikipedia etc
sirn 8y ago
One thing to note if someone consider switching from GitHub to Phabricator: Phabricator use a pre-commit reviews based on patches rather than being branch-based like in GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket. Make sure to read the Phabricator Review Workflow[1] before making the switch, because everyone in your team have to change their workflow if they already used to Pull Request/Merge Request workflow. :-) That said, I always found Phabricator's issue tracker (Maniphest) to be superior to GitHub Issues, with ability to create task dependencies (parent/child) and ability to limit tasks permissions only to few selected groups (with spaces). It's possible to setup Phabricator to mirror other repositories if you want to use only its issue tracker. [1]: https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_review_merge_publish_phabricator_review_workflow/ https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_rev...
- lima 8y ago
  The patch-based workflow is very similar to how the Linux kernel review workflow works. Arguably, this is the way Git is supposed to work - submit patches, discuss them, then merge them once they're ready. Every idea is one commit, no checkpoints or "fix typo". Pull requests are used to merge other maintainer's trees that have many commits in them. It also ensures that there's a permanent link between a commit and its review, since there's a 1:1 mapping. Gerrit works similarly, but Phabricator's UI is much more friendly. For small projects or teams, the overhead of introducing a new tool may not be worth it, for for large projects with many contributors, the workflow is - in my opinion - strongly superior. If you set Github to "squash and rebase" and enforce a "one PR per idea" rule, you will get a pretty similar workflow. The tooling isn't quite as polished, but it's sufficient for many projects. Quote: > As far as code reviews go, this is pretty spot on. I was part of a a startup that was using GitHub pull requests for code reviews. As the team grew, it became more and more intractable, although not simply because of notifications. Side-by-side diffs and checkpointed diffs (so that you can see what changed since the last round of review and whether/how your comments were addressed) are handled very poorly by GitHub. We ultimately switched to Phabricator, and while there was a little friction as folks got acquainted with the new tool, it made code reviews a much more pleasant process. Recently, I had to go through a full code review back on GH pull requests, and it felt like pulling teeth in comparison. They're fine for interacting with contributors to an open source project, but compared to working with a tool like Phabricator that's built for a code reviewer's workflow (and for teams of engineers working together on a project), they just don't hold a candle, in my opinion. (from a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697132)
vemv 8y ago
Used Phabricator/Arcanist for one year straight, it wasn't fun. It's pedantic, buggy, happy to mutate your branches or "revisions" (PRs) unless you take specific care (which won't happen until you've been bitten enough times). Wrapping git is essentially a flawed idea; there are just too many corner cases (rebasing, resetting etc) for a wrapper to handle them all.
- lima 8y ago
  Pointing out flaws without detailing them isn't very useful. Arcanist is not a Git wrapper - you can (and should) use Git normally. All Arcanist does is automate the process of creating and uploading patches, and applying remote patches.
  - vemv 8y ago
    Well I cannot recall every intricacy about a tool I don't care about anymore. Simply an experience report from a reasonably reputed HN member. The `arc` command did rewrite my branches, ruin my revisions or otherwise do something buggy a handful of times, particularly with `arc update`.
  - maxlybbert 8y ago
    It could help people trying to decide whether to switch to the tool.
  - ianamartin 8y ago
    Pointing out flaws without going into a lot of detail isn't very good practice if you're trying to offer helpful criticism in a feature request, a bug report, or generally trying to work with the team to improve it. It's completely fine and quite useful for someone to say that their experience was bad with a tool in general on an internet thread about the tool in general.
  - rimliu 8y ago
    It calls git under the hood how it is not a wrapper? It also alows to create branches, not just manage patches.
- 8y ago
ChankeyPathak 8y ago
HN discussion on available alternatives to GitHub. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241487
cordite 8y ago
I use phabricator at work, it is an incredible tool and the patch workflow and even dependencies for diffs are wonderful. I’ve also tried to volunteer add to a project on github but whenever a pull request depends on another, it gets messy. Rewriting history all the time to make commits easier to review has been a pain.
trasz 8y ago
Also used by FreeBSD (http://reviews.freebsd.org http://reviews.freebsd.org).
mrmattyboy 8y ago
Have been using it for years and years and would thoroughly recommend. Would have to say that some of the different parts of it feel quite seperated and disconnected, e.g. the source code 'side' of it and ticketing 'side' etc.
- colonelpopcorn 8y ago
  All the docs I've read on Phabricator seem to imply that this is by design.
epriest 8y ago
I've contributed some code to Phabricator, happy to answer any questions about why that code is so bad. Phabricator is primarily aimed at teams with multiple approximately-full-time engineers working on projects together, and focuses more on scaling up to thousands of engineers than scaling down to personal projects. It may be a poor fit for your needs if you're looking to move very small projects away from GitHub following the acquisition by Microsoft.
- lima 8y ago
  Hah, Phabricator is what I point to when people say "it's impossible to write good software in PHP".
  - 20after4 8y ago
    It's a very good example of well-written PHP code, indeed.
- segmondy 8y ago
  Really? I've used it for a few years now to host my very personal projects I don't feel like uploading to GitHub and bitbucket
  - lima 8y ago
    For small projects where most outside contributions are "drive by PRs" by random people, Phabricator may not be the best choice due to its complexity. I hope they will add a "git push"-based workflow to accommodate this use case.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Ha! Epriest is actually the primary Phabricator developer by my read of their webpage. Can you guys advertise more? I hear about Atlassian on NPR and my IT team has guys fully sold on their stuff but my team has been operating very cleanly off a Phabricator VM for years now. However IT keeps pushing me to go all Atlassian so they can "support it". I'm like, yo, git pull every few months to upgrade and keep the VM patched. They're like but Atlassian has conferences. What should I do?
maktouch 8y ago
We moved from Gitlab to Phab a year ago. Context: - One of the main repo is a monorepo in Git with over 40~ services - We have a lot of smaller repos that are outdated or depreciated. - We have an extensive pipeline that builds Docker images using Google Cloud Container Builder Here's the pros: - Speed. Gitlab is so slow; it's actually one of the main reasons why we moved out of it. - Phabricator's Maniphest > Gitlab Issues by a long shot - We prefer patch-based workflow. It makes Git history pretty. - Code review is so much better in Phabricator, again, by a long shot. It's faster and the experience is a lot better. - Herald (if-this-then-that for source code) is the bomb. We have a big list of rules, example: detecting `dangerouslySetInnerHTML` in our frontend service and adding blocking reviewers. - Git management is pretty dope, setting it up so that it mirrors somewhere else is pretty easy. In our case, we just made it so that it mirrors to Google Cloud Repository (for GCCB to work) - Cluster mode is included, which is useful because we're setting up a mirror Phab Repo in Russia for our team there - Meme editor makes things more fun (but its kinda shitty that it doesn't accept GIF =\) - The dashboard editor is very powerful and useful. - We had teams using SVN and teams using HG. Phab supports them all. That's pretty cool. Here's the cons: - Harbormaster, the CI, is the worst. It's seriously super complicated and not powerful at all. - To replace Gitlab CI, we moved to Buildkite since there's an integration with Phab. Buildkite is a lot more powerful than Gitlab CI, and the syntax is similar. - The concept of "staging" repo is super confusing. - Setting up "merge" from the UI is very complicated and buggy
- yani 8y ago
  I have not noticed any performance issues on GitLab. Were you using their free plan by the time you switched?
  - philjohn 8y ago
    I suspect they are talking about the self-hosted version. You need to throw quite a lot of hardware at it for acceptable performance.
  - ksec 8y ago
    Somewhere around 2016 and 2017, Gitlab made many performance improvement. May be OP was referencing slightly earlier? ( Or not ) Depending on who you are ask, Gitlab today is usable or Ok. I don't think anyone would call it fast. I wish they could write up where those bottlenecks are.
neandrake 8y ago
A few years back I went through and evaluated multiple different tools primarily for their code review capabilities. I looked at quite a few including GitLab, Gogs, ReviewBoard, SmartBear, and Phabricator. We use Mercurial for source control and nearly considered migrating to Git because that's where the majority of tooling exists. We set up Phabricator and haven't looked back. Getting developers to use Phabricator/Arcanist was fairly organic -- learning to use a command line tool for creating the reviews was probably the most challenging but devs learned it because of the convenience of the code review. It's very well-designed and has support for enterprise features like ldap, clustered servers, CI, etc. and there's no distinction between community/enterprise versions -- it's all open source. Other great features are task management, wiki, blogs, question/answer (a la StackOverflow), and of course memes/macros which add some lighthearted fun to code review. The engineering behind the product is top-notch which is evident from reviewing the tasks/discussions behind features [1], or even reviewing the source code. One killer feature for my company was Spaces, which allows setting up "walled gardens" -- we use it to allow external collaborators to create tasks, etc. without being able to see anything outside their own space. Managing and maintaining Phabricator is pretty straightforward. It's a standard LAMP type of product (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) which is easy for myself or IT to jump on and diagnose issues. It's the only tool I've seen which will also alert administrators to identified issues with configuration (when logged into web page). Additionally administrators of the tool do not have blatant all-access to projects, though that might be niche. I'm glad it's getting more notice now, even if it's largely due to Microsoft acquiring GitHub. I don't know if Facebook uses Phabricator still but WikiMedia does and I belive the Mercurial development team is considering it [2]. Phabricator is a great product and worth trying out. Their community is located at [3] - they used to allow open access to their self-hosted Phabricator instance but it became too noisy as the user base grew so they've moved to discourse forums. [1] https://secure.phabricator.com https://secure.phabricator.com [2] https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/ https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/ [3] https://discourse.phabricator-community.org/ https://discourse.phabricator-community.org/
- lima 8y ago
  > I don't know if Facebook uses Phabricator still Last time I heard, multiple teams at Facebook are using it.
indescions_2018 8y ago
Lubuntu team uses it as well: https://phab.lubuntu.me/ https://phab.lubuntu.me/
cyberferret 8y ago
Been using Phabricator for a few years now at our SaaS, and it is a great system. Recently really went to town with Herald rules etc., as well as connecting it up to AWS CodeCommit + CodePipeline to review and deploy to our staging server from our 'develop' git branches etc. Very granular control over workflow. Took me a while to get to grips with the 'fun' spelling all over the place though. I know there is a 'serious' mode, but that it way too serious! :)
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  You can at least change the spelling on the main page to Tasks and Bugs, Code Review, etc. Agreed that serious business mode is slightly too serious. I miss the acsii dragon when pushes were denied by heralds.
drewg123 8y ago
We use it for FreeBSD. My impression, coming from tools like gerrit, bitbucket/stash, fisheye/crucible and google3 is that phab is a review tool that kind of wants to be a source control tool, but it fails at both. I actually dread putting up reviews when I upstream stuff to FreeBSD because I hate phab. I've found that it is just easier for me to use the "upload patch" feature than it is to use their arcanist tools on top of git or svn. I really wish the project would move away from this tool.
- Izkata 8y ago
  Several years ago, we also used Phabricator for code reviews. It had just enough friction that eventually our team fell to manual code reviews ("Hey, could you check out revision X?"), then eventually just stopped bothering to code review at all. Since switching to Fisheye/Crucible, code reviews have become so easy we do them all the time as part of the normal workflow. I really can't imagine switching back nowadays.
navd 8y ago
Any opinions on Phabricator vs Gerrit? I'm currently working on a project using the latter.
- 20after4 8y ago
  Wikimedia uses both, unfortunately. They each have their advantages, however, Phabricator has a usable interface while Gerrit is one of the worst GUIs I've ever seen.
- guitarbill 8y ago
  Gerrit is ugly* and less fully featured, but I love it. It's great for linear master branches. I like the rebase support, it means what I reviewed goes into master, no squashing required. And diffing between rebased patchsets works great and is a killer review feature (most tools get very unhappy when you rebase). It's only really for code review though. No nice web UI for browsing repositories, no issue tracking, etc. This was a plus for us (very unix-y and easy to integrate with existing systems), but could be seen as a negative. * The UI is getting better, and you can tweak the CSS, it's pretty simple.
smakhtin 8y ago
Chronotope.io CTO here. We are using Phabricator as our primary organization tool for the team of 20+ people. Maniphest (task management) was the main reason why we chose Phabricator. I agree that Arcanist can seem complex when you first use it, but after you start to use `arc feature` you never want to go back. We love patch-based workflow and how task management integrated with tasks. I wish Herald to have more integrations, but Phabricator API is quite nice and we built our own integration for Jenkins, similar to what Uber did, but working natively with Jenkins Pipeline.
m4r71n 8y ago
Another option is the one created by the Fedora project: https://pagure.io/pagure https://pagure.io/pagure. It's a Git hosting solution where all the additional bits related to a repo (issues, docs, etc.) are also their own Git repos that can be pulled and pushed into.
donaldguy 8y ago
Yo I love phabricator; it's one of my favorite pieces of software, but three things: 1. The title's seeming attribution to Wikimedia as opposed to Facebook (or even Phacility) is like, whatever the opposite of dog whistling is 2. If you want to host your own things, great; do that. Phab is great, gitlab is also pretty neat. If you want someone to manage this stuff for you, Phacility is out there grindin' but they also have like O(10) employees, so don't expect miracles 3. The point of GitHub was always about "social coding"; the concerns about overcentralization aren't unfounded but it's also not like that wasn't straight up the value proposition in th the first place! If everyone moves off to their own walled gardens, something of value will be lost. So like, again: love phab (it/arc's my favorite code review workflow, I think the conventions it adds on commit messages are really valuable (and btw trace right back to Facebook eng culture), the pretty tight integration of tools is nice, I enjoy its sense of humor), but I think calling it meaningfully a true GitHub alternative, with any consideration of FOSS, is inaccurate Disclosure: I left a startup using phab (at my urging) and GitHub at the end of March and now work at Microsoft (where my team has some code on VSTS and some on GitHub). I first encountered Phab as an intern at FB in 2011, when epreistly had just left
kazinator 8y ago
What would be cool is some peer-to-peer git protocol. Say I have a local repo, but don't host my own domain. Suppose I could run something which connects to the peer-to-peer rendezvous server, which provides a web presence for my repo. Then suppose that the clone URL served by this repo would just put the user in contact with my IP address to do the git clone from me directly. The public server facilitates the contact and provides a presence. Patching this into git would help. Suppose git supported some htt2p://foo.bar/baz URL which connects to foo.bar, and retrieves a special dynamic resource baz which redirects it to the current location of baz; e.g. git://x.y.z.w/whatever/baz
- mkirklions 8y ago
  Im not a fan of blockchain for most applications, but couldnt this be one? People that want to host code on the internet just need to pay the fee to put it on the internet. Once its there, anyone can download it. Hopefully the fee is trivial, I'm guessing this wouldnt be a problem since it would be less popular than Bitcoin.
  - cobalt 8y ago
    git is basically a block chain by design. Both it and bitcoin use variants of a merkle tree
- pushtheenvelope 8y ago
  you may be interested in Gittorrent. I'll link to the recent HN discussion, since the original article was from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234498 original article: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/ https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto...
sciurus 8y ago
My experience with Phabricator is with the code review system (Differential), rules system (Herald), CLI (Arcanist), and API (Conduit). I can't speak to other functionality like repo hosting or task management. I joined Eventbrite shortly after they moved from Review Board to Phabricator for code review about 4 years ago. It took me a little while to adjust, but once I did I found it to be superior to what Github provided. The CLI provides a nice way to standardize on a workflow company-wide. The UI for composing a review has a few quirks but a lot of functionality, and the patch-based aspect makes it easy to track the evolution of a diff. Herald is very powerful for making sure the right people review a diff. Conduit provided what we need to integrate with Jenkins for CI. Github has gotten better since then, but I'd still lean toward Phabricator as the better tool for code review, especially for larger projects. I eventually partially inherited running Phabricator at Eventbrite, and found it overall to be straightforward to configure and troubleshoot. We were only running a single node and using git for repositories, though. Now I'm at Mozilla, and we recently switched from Review Board to Phabricator for Firefox code review. Some of my teammates run the service, and I know that running a multinode setup with mercurial as the repo format has proven challenging.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dcosson 8y ago
  I only tried out Phabricator briefly, and it was pretty good. But the data model bothered me in how it introduces its own abstraction of patches on top of the git branch model. It seems redundant, and also seems like an SVN-inspired model that just felt like a step backwards from having the power of plain git (as in the ability to create diff objects and branch and rearrange them arbitrarily in a pretty simple way, and have multiple people working on these branches at the same time and keeping in sync with each other). I know you can still use plain git locally with Phabricator, but the extra layer of abstraction seemed to only add complexity since now you basically have different data models locally as you do on the server whereas previously they were the same. And what you gain from it didn't seem big enough to justify this, because at the end of the day you can accomplish a lot of the same things in git (like using the squash & merge strategy in github) without introducing any new primitives. I didn't use it long enough to really figure out if this is a purely aesthetic concern and I'm just being stubborn about the way I'm used to or if it leads to real problems in practice. I'm curious what people who really like Phabricator think about this.
kemayo 8y ago
It says "used by the Wikimedia Foundation" in the title, but that's sort of misleading. We do use Maniphest, the issue tracker component, heavily. And it's pretty great, honestly. I find it to be a useful blend of exposed functionality and ease of use. That said, we don't use Differential, the code review component for most (any?) teams. Instead we're pretty entrenched on gerrit still, and I haven't seen any signs of that changing over the last few years.
- 20after4 8y ago
  Sad but true.
salicideblock 8y ago
I have been using Phabricator for the past couple of years, mainly for code review. I would point out the very wide feature set for a development team, beyond code hosting and review. A couple of times I was thinking " we should set up a web app with this", only to find it with a few clicks that Phabricator already had it. A few gems: - pastebin-like app - Instant chat - task manager with planning None of them are top-of-the class, but it's helpful to have them all in the same setup.
isoos 8y ago
A few years ago I've used Phabricator as an example for "You can write reasonable code in PHP too." I haven't checked it recently, but at that point it was readable, well structured and commented code. Unfortunately I never got around installing and using it, as it heavily relies on PHP installed as command line tool (for preparing a change for pre-submit code review).
ausjke 8y ago
I wish they picked up some different names, anyway at the moment gitea has all I need for personal projects. I wish gitea could be used as a file manager(file explorer), i.e. with folders on the side and I can navigator files and review them easily, sort of like the linux 'ranger' command inside browser, I know this is asking too much.
pdpi 8y ago
I used Phabricator on a daily basis at Facebook, and loved it, after having used it at a previous job where I hated it. The biggest reason for that was that Phabricator is a piece of software that wants to be used in a very particular way, and that is the "you're all in" sort of way. It's not a tool you'll get good results from by timidly testing the water with your toe. One particular manifestation of the prior point is that, for me, it worked best with a one-commit-per-unit-of-work workflow, where stacks can be merged on a commit-by-commit basis and code review issues are addressed by editing the changes into the relevant commits. In Git, making this work is a painful amount of history rewriting that lands you in a world of rebase pain. In Mercurial, you just fix things at the top of the stack and `hg absorb` the changes into their relevant commits. `hg absorb` is, in fact, the one Mercurial command I really wish I had in Git.
davidcuddeback 8y ago
A while back, I chose to migrate my open source projects from GitHub to Phabricator. Having open source projects on GitHub has felt like having an email inbox that's open to the public where there's an expectation to respond to every form of spam. It's been a source of aggravation for me that's taken the fun out of coding on side projects. In my opinion, two out of the three bullet points from Dear GitHub [1] are still unaddressed, but all three are handled by Phabricator. I looked at GitLab, Bitbucket, and Phabricator. I selected Phabricator because it provides more control for moderation and managing workflows and it's 100% open source [2]. Some examples of ways Phabricator can be customized: - Create a custom "New Bug Report" form with fields for reproduction steps, expected results, actual results, software version, operating system, etc. Customized forms are more than just a Markdown template. (This is the first bullet point from Dear GitHub.) - Provide instructions on how to fill out each custom form. You can customize the blurb at the top of each form using Remarkup (similar to Markdown). (This is the third bullet point from Dear GitHub.) - Keep security issues restricted to a private group until they've been resolved. - Default user-reported issues to private until they've been triaged. (This could help alleviate the expectation to publicly reply to all spam.) - Require users to acknowledge the contributing guidelines before submitting a feature request. - Access to forms can be customized with ACL groups, which can be used to moderate spam by granting or revoking access to features based on users' behavior. - Require signing a CLA or DCO before submitting a patch. This has first-class support since Phacility requires a CLA for contributions to Phabricator. - Tasks can have subtypes, such as "feature" and "bug." (You can also do this with "project" tags, but I think Phacility's plan is to use subtypes to extend the custom fields functionality.) Phabricator also has some nice extras that weren't part of my decision criteria: - It has a built-in blogging application (Phame), which could be used to publish release notes or important changes (e.g., "Upcoming Breaking Changes in v2.0"). A feed of these news items can be added to a custom dashboard along with commit and task activity to help users keep up to date. - A built-in polling application (Slowvote) can be used to solicit feedback. - A Q&A app (Ponder) could be used to help answer users' questions without cluttering the issue tracker. Unfortunately, this app currently lacks some customization and moderation capabilities. - Paste is for sharing snippets (similar to Gist). - Flags can be used to bookmark anything you want to remember to come back to with an attached note. - Pholio is a review tool for mockups. I probably won't need this for my peronsal projects, but I thought it was a cool idea. Phabricator comes with some trade-offs. The downsides that I've noticed: - There isn't a good hosted option for open source projects. Phacility provides hosting at $20/user/month, but if you have to pay $20/month for every user that signs up to file an issue, that's financially unviable for an open source project. Personally, I prefer self-hosting, so this isn't an issue for me. I'm mentioning it because I know others will prefer a hosted solution. - Navigating the UI isn't as smooth out of the box. Some common tasks require an extra click or two compared to GitHub or GitLab. Some of it can be alleviated by customizing the places where you want a direct link. For example, you can add a link to a repository in a project's sidebar. (Projects are independent of repositories, so they're not automatically linked.) - It's meant to be customized, so it's not as simple as just install it and start using it right away. It takes some time to setup and migrate projects. - Many of the tools that aren't core functionality (repos, tasks, code review) are MVP quality. This includes the CI tool (Harbormaster) [3], the Q&A app (Ponder), and the human intelligence queue (Nuance) [4] among others. - Phacility's focus is on enterprise customers, so it's not clear how issues that are unique to open source projects will be prioritized. I haven't seen this be a problem and it's used by some prominent open source projects (FreeBSD, GnuPG, Wikimedia), but it's worth mentioning as a possibility. I've been playing around with Phabricator on a FreeBSD instance on DigitalOcean. For anyone else considering Phabricator, note that the page response time is greatly affected by the instance type that you choose. A standard droplet on DigitalOcean or any of the VC2 instances on Vultr provided about a 1 second response time (measured by Nginx's $request_time in the logs). A CPU optimized droplet on DigitalOcean provides about a 100 millisecond response time and results in a noticably more responsive UI. I can't speak to the response time on EC2 instances, because I've only tried hosting providers with first-class FreeBSD support. [1] https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github [2] "No special editions. Everything included, open and free" (https://phacility.com/phabricator/ https://phacility.com/phabricator/). [3] The documentation for Harbormaster says that all it's really good for is to notify an external CI system (Jenkins, Buildbot, etc) to trigger a build and then to receive build results. It doesn't have any built-in capability of running builds. [4] Nuance seems like it has potential as a triage queue for user-reported feature requests and bug reports, but it currently lacks the necessary customization. (Edited for formatting.)
bsimpson 8y ago
The stack-based workflow in Phabricator makes so much more sense to me than GitHub's branch-and-PR model. I've never understood how people can be productive in GitHub for anything beyond minor changes.
partycoder 8y ago
If the main focus is code reviewing, I would rather try Gerrit / Gitiles instead. It is less invasive, doesn't include issue tracking.
amaccuish 8y ago
The humour of the front page got me interested. Looks good (y)
sho_hn 8y ago
We use Phabricator at KDE, too, with many hundreds of contributors. Currently mostly for code review and task planning, which we're happy with, outside some nav woes with Pholio. We haven't retired Bugzilla for issue tracking yet, though.
verigit 8y ago
If you are on a mac, another alternative is EasyGit (https://easygit.me https://easygit.me). It is just the git hosting part (i.e. no issues, wikis, etc) but you just pay for the app, there are no on-going subscriptions. EasyGit stores your repos privately on iCloud and it doesn't use any 3rd party servers or analytics. In fact its sandbox doesn't allow any outgoing network connections, apart from talking to iCloud. Disclaimer: This is my app and btw I'm running a WWDC promotion and you can download it for free till Friday: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easygit/id1228242832?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easygit/id1228242832?mt=12
littledot5566 8y ago
I really wish Phabricator Tasks could have custom statuses and not just "Open/Close". This would make the Workboard feature so much more useful.
- neandrake 8y ago
  How do you mean? Custom statuses can be configured if you visit `/config/edit/maniphest.statuses/`. It's also pretty well documented how to customize statuses there.
- aseipp 8y ago
  You can do this. Go to Config > Application Settings > Maniphest and use the "maniphest.statuses" option. The amount of control is actually rather nice.
aidenn0 8y ago
I've used Phabricator along side github; you can have it track any external git repository, and use its task tracking and code auditing tools, both of which are much better than github (Github's CI integrations are much better though, fwiw). The value added by github is primarily that you can get drive-by patches submitted because it's become the tool that so many developers both already know how to use and already have an accountse. Phabricator is much more focused on providing value to set teams working on a project, and it does that really, really well.
soulnothing 8y ago
I was a heavy user of Phabricator 2014 -> 2017. Spinning it up internally at work for code reviews. Ticketing, project management etc. It was nice that everything was tied together. Wiki, code reviews, sprints, etc. It was one common application. That could easily link back to one another. The idea of tying a repository to a specific project was great. As was being able to in-line issues directly in a pull request. However when I went to spin up a new project, and stack for myself, earlier this year. I went through the major options and settled on GitLab. I'm doing this on the public site, with public repositories. So can't speak to the pains of self-hosting. But phabricator I think is still a great alternative if you want to use it on site. Another benefit is being able to mix and match source control systems
lamby 8y ago
"Set sail for adventure..."

376 points by TekMol 8y ago

lorenzfx 8y ago

Better link: https://phacility.com/phabricator/ https://phacility.com/phabricator/

Sujan 8y ago
Better link indeed. But also a bit scary: > Review others' code with Differential, because they can't be trusted.
- akx 8y ago
  All of Phabricator's copy is off-color like that. Don't take it too seriously.
  - Sujan 8y ago
    Thanks, reading on confirmed that.
    - lucideer 8y ago
      It used to be much easier to tell when Phabricator was its own dedicated thing (before it got moved under the Phacility umbrella). Before it redirected, the old https://phabricator.org/ https://phabricator.org/ was basically a comedy marketing page: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014537/http://phabricator.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014537/http://phabricato... The software itself is similarly whimsical[0][1] [0] https://secure.phabricator.com/D7216 https://secure.phabricator.com/D7216 [1] https://secure.phabricator.com/rP099695ab615775e5f6d107fba406f7ea45fa7b79 https://secure.phabricator.com/rP099695ab615775e5f6d107fba40...
      - seba_dos1 8y ago
        Especially check out https://secure.phabricator.com/D13641 https://secure.phabricator.com/D13641 :)
  - shoo 8y ago
    https://hackerone.com/phabricator?view_policy=true https://hackerone.com/phabricator?view_policy=true > Phabricator has more than 300,000 lines of PHP, so there are probably at least sixty or seventy million security vulnerabilities in the project. Virtually limitless wealth!
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  "Written in PHP so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program." - not exactly a cheery marketing point for PHP, not sure I'd want to use something written by people who have no idea how to program. But I guess that's why they have the blurb above...
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    You use the web, don't you? /s
  - krapp 8y ago
    It's PHP, you don't have to know how to program to use it, you just have to believe strongly enough.
  - mberger 8y ago
    As a PHP programmers, we've gotten so used to people shitting on our language that we've internalized it and shit on it ourselves now. I don't like it but I'll lump it for the convenient std lib.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    It's a joke. You can't speak about PHP online without getting inundated with comments about how supposedly awful it is, and how if you like PHP you are a bad developer. They are just embracing the steriotype sarcastically.
  - vortico 8y ago
    I saw that at the bottom of https://phacility.com/phabricator/ https://phacility.com/phabricator/ and actually laughed out loud. Good to see a sense of humor and self-criticism.
- neandrake 8y ago
  See [1], "Phabricator uses a lighthearted tone in documentation and some interfaces, and includes some features which primarily exist to add flavor or make things sillier. We use this tone because we like building software like this, and the feedback we receive about it from users is overwhelmingly (and often effusively) positive." [1] https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone/ https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone...
kostajh 8y ago
yes, maybe someone could change the main link on this post? As it is, the HN traffic appears to be disrupting the Wikimedia instance.

mhoad 8y ago

Wasn't this originally developed in-house in Facebook and still their go-to solution?

samcday 8y ago
Yep, but apparently the original author left Facebook to continue working on Phabricator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator

sdi9usu8dfu8f 8y ago

Also used by llvm: https://llvm.org/docs/Phabricator.html https://llvm.org/docs/Phabricator.html

doubleunplussed 8y ago

And it supports mercurial!

stealthmodeclan 8y ago

Also used by GHC. Glasgow Haskell Compiler

kqr 8y ago
...and I remember one of the maintainers saying something along the lines of "Some of us don't even compile our code locally anymore. Sometimes you just throw code at Phab and get an email back telling you what you need to fix." I can't remember in what context that was, but ever since I heard that, I have been wanting to try Phabricator out. I guess this is as good an opportunity as any!

gitgud 8y ago

A little ironic that the source code is managed on GitHub (9k stars) https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/ https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/

timendum 8y ago
It's definitively a mirror, the repositories are at https://secure.phabricator.com/diffusion/ https://secure.phabricator.com/diffusion/ Phabricator: https://secure.phabricator.com/source/phabricator/ https://secure.phabricator.com/source/phabricator/ Clone via https://secure.phabricator.com/source/phabricator.git https://secure.phabricator.com/source/phabricator.git
- gitgud 8y ago
  Yeah ok, that makes sense now
johnnyfaehell 8y ago
Not managed, mirrored. It's managed at https://secure.phabricator.com/ https://secure.phabricator.com/

peremen 8y ago

Also used by KDE: https://phabricator.kde.org/ https://phabricator.kde.org/

seba_dos1 8y ago
Yeah, I've recently contributed a few patches to KDE and it was surprisingly pleasant. Github-like approach works well where it works, but doesn't scale that well.

sqs 8y ago

Sourcegraph CEO here. We have many customers using Phabricator with our Sourcegraph Phabricator extension, which adds code intelligence (hovers, definitions, references, implementations), and search to Phab diffs. It makes reviewing code pretty magical since you have IDE-like context. The Sourcegraph extension for Phabricator is open source at https://github.com/sourcegraph/phabricator-extension https://github.com/sourcegraph/phabricator-extension. If you are considering switching from GitHub to Phabricator, definitely give this integration a try. Would love to hear feedback! Will post a demo video soon.

ahartmetz 8y ago
It is worth mentioning that Sourcegraph itself isn't Free / Open Source software... which makes the license of the plugin irrelevant (and in fact Phabricator's license likely forced your hand), so it's just a little bit fishy that the only license you mentioned is that of the plugin.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  To be fair (s)he said she was the CEO and I would always assume that means paid for - "core maintainer" and I would have agreed with you.

rimliu 8y ago

You will probably not enjoy it if you like pull requests.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

thinkingemote 8y ago

Phabricator is used extensively by Wikimedia, Wikipedia etc

sirn 8y ago

One thing to note if someone consider switching from GitHub to Phabricator: Phabricator use a pre-commit reviews based on patches rather than being branch-based like in GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket. Make sure to read the Phabricator Review Workflow[1] before making the switch, because everyone in your team have to change their workflow if they already used to Pull Request/Merge Request workflow. :-) That said, I always found Phabricator's issue tracker (Maniphest) to be superior to GitHub Issues, with ability to create task dependencies (parent/child) and ability to limit tasks permissions only to few selected groups (with spaces). It's possible to setup Phabricator to mirror other repositories if you want to use only its issue tracker. [1]: https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_review_merge_publish_phabricator_review_workflow/ https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_rev...

lima 8y ago
The patch-based workflow is very similar to how the Linux kernel review workflow works. Arguably, this is the way Git is supposed to work - submit patches, discuss them, then merge them once they're ready. Every idea is one commit, no checkpoints or "fix typo". Pull requests are used to merge other maintainer's trees that have many commits in them. It also ensures that there's a permanent link between a commit and its review, since there's a 1:1 mapping. Gerrit works similarly, but Phabricator's UI is much more friendly. For small projects or teams, the overhead of introducing a new tool may not be worth it, for for large projects with many contributors, the workflow is - in my opinion - strongly superior. If you set Github to "squash and rebase" and enforce a "one PR per idea" rule, you will get a pretty similar workflow. The tooling isn't quite as polished, but it's sufficient for many projects. Quote: > As far as code reviews go, this is pretty spot on. I was part of a a startup that was using GitHub pull requests for code reviews. As the team grew, it became more and more intractable, although not simply because of notifications. Side-by-side diffs and checkpointed diffs (so that you can see what changed since the last round of review and whether/how your comments were addressed) are handled very poorly by GitHub. We ultimately switched to Phabricator, and while there was a little friction as folks got acquainted with the new tool, it made code reviews a much more pleasant process. Recently, I had to go through a full code review back on GH pull requests, and it felt like pulling teeth in comparison. They're fine for interacting with contributors to an open source project, but compared to working with a tool like Phabricator that's built for a code reviewer's workflow (and for teams of engineers working together on a project), they just don't hold a candle, in my opinion. (from a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7697132)

vemv 8y ago

Used Phabricator/Arcanist for one year straight, it wasn't fun. It's pedantic, buggy, happy to mutate your branches or "revisions" (PRs) unless you take specific care (which won't happen until you've been bitten enough times). Wrapping git is essentially a flawed idea; there are just too many corner cases (rebasing, resetting etc) for a wrapper to handle them all.

lima 8y ago
Pointing out flaws without detailing them isn't very useful. Arcanist is not a Git wrapper - you can (and should) use Git normally. All Arcanist does is automate the process of creating and uploading patches, and applying remote patches.
- vemv 8y ago
  Well I cannot recall every intricacy about a tool I don't care about anymore. Simply an experience report from a reasonably reputed HN member. The `arc` command did rewrite my branches, ruin my revisions or otherwise do something buggy a handful of times, particularly with `arc update`.
- maxlybbert 8y ago
  It could help people trying to decide whether to switch to the tool.
- ianamartin 8y ago
  Pointing out flaws without going into a lot of detail isn't very good practice if you're trying to offer helpful criticism in a feature request, a bug report, or generally trying to work with the team to improve it. It's completely fine and quite useful for someone to say that their experience was bad with a tool in general on an internet thread about the tool in general.
- rimliu 8y ago
  It calls git under the hood how it is not a wrapper? It also alows to create branches, not just manage patches.
8y ago

ChankeyPathak 8y ago

HN discussion on available alternatives to GitHub. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241487

cordite 8y ago

I use phabricator at work, it is an incredible tool and the patch workflow and even dependencies for diffs are wonderful. I’ve also tried to volunteer add to a project on github but whenever a pull request depends on another, it gets messy. Rewriting history all the time to make commits easier to review has been a pain.

trasz 8y ago

Also used by FreeBSD (http://reviews.freebsd.org http://reviews.freebsd.org).

mrmattyboy 8y ago

Have been using it for years and years and would thoroughly recommend. Would have to say that some of the different parts of it feel quite seperated and disconnected, e.g. the source code 'side' of it and ticketing 'side' etc.

colonelpopcorn 8y ago
All the docs I've read on Phabricator seem to imply that this is by design.

epriest 8y ago

I've contributed some code to Phabricator, happy to answer any questions about why that code is so bad. Phabricator is primarily aimed at teams with multiple approximately-full-time engineers working on projects together, and focuses more on scaling up to thousands of engineers than scaling down to personal projects. It may be a poor fit for your needs if you're looking to move very small projects away from GitHub following the acquisition by Microsoft.

lima 8y ago
Hah, Phabricator is what I point to when people say "it's impossible to write good software in PHP".
- 20after4 8y ago
  It's a very good example of well-written PHP code, indeed.
segmondy 8y ago
Really? I've used it for a few years now to host my very personal projects I don't feel like uploading to GitHub and bitbucket
- lima 8y ago
  For small projects where most outside contributions are "drive by PRs" by random people, Phabricator may not be the best choice due to its complexity. I hope they will add a "git push"-based workflow to accommodate this use case.
acidburnNSA 8y ago
Ha! Epriest is actually the primary Phabricator developer by my read of their webpage. Can you guys advertise more? I hear about Atlassian on NPR and my IT team has guys fully sold on their stuff but my team has been operating very cleanly off a Phabricator VM for years now. However IT keeps pushing me to go all Atlassian so they can "support it". I'm like, yo, git pull every few months to upgrade and keep the VM patched. They're like but Atlassian has conferences. What should I do?

maktouch 8y ago

We moved from Gitlab to Phab a year ago. Context: - One of the main repo is a monorepo in Git with over 40~ services - We have a lot of smaller repos that are outdated or depreciated. - We have an extensive pipeline that builds Docker images using Google Cloud Container Builder Here's the pros: - Speed. Gitlab is so slow; it's actually one of the main reasons why we moved out of it. - Phabricator's Maniphest > Gitlab Issues by a long shot - We prefer patch-based workflow. It makes Git history pretty. - Code review is so much better in Phabricator, again, by a long shot. It's faster and the experience is a lot better. - Herald (if-this-then-that for source code) is the bomb. We have a big list of rules, example: detecting `dangerouslySetInnerHTML` in our frontend service and adding blocking reviewers. - Git management is pretty dope, setting it up so that it mirrors somewhere else is pretty easy. In our case, we just made it so that it mirrors to Google Cloud Repository (for GCCB to work) - Cluster mode is included, which is useful because we're setting up a mirror Phab Repo in Russia for our team there - Meme editor makes things more fun (but its kinda shitty that it doesn't accept GIF =\) - The dashboard editor is very powerful and useful. - We had teams using SVN and teams using HG. Phab supports them all. That's pretty cool. Here's the cons: - Harbormaster, the CI, is the worst. It's seriously super complicated and not powerful at all. - To replace Gitlab CI, we moved to Buildkite since there's an integration with Phab. Buildkite is a lot more powerful than Gitlab CI, and the syntax is similar. - The concept of "staging" repo is super confusing. - Setting up "merge" from the UI is very complicated and buggy

yani 8y ago
I have not noticed any performance issues on GitLab. Were you using their free plan by the time you switched?
- philjohn 8y ago
  I suspect they are talking about the self-hosted version. You need to throw quite a lot of hardware at it for acceptable performance.
- ksec 8y ago
  Somewhere around 2016 and 2017, Gitlab made many performance improvement. May be OP was referencing slightly earlier? ( Or not ) Depending on who you are ask, Gitlab today is usable or Ok. I don't think anyone would call it fast. I wish they could write up where those bottlenecks are.

neandrake 8y ago

A few years back I went through and evaluated multiple different tools primarily for their code review capabilities. I looked at quite a few including GitLab, Gogs, ReviewBoard, SmartBear, and Phabricator. We use Mercurial for source control and nearly considered migrating to Git because that's where the majority of tooling exists. We set up Phabricator and haven't looked back. Getting developers to use Phabricator/Arcanist was fairly organic -- learning to use a command line tool for creating the reviews was probably the most challenging but devs learned it because of the convenience of the code review. It's very well-designed and has support for enterprise features like ldap, clustered servers, CI, etc. and there's no distinction between community/enterprise versions -- it's all open source. Other great features are task management, wiki, blogs, question/answer (a la StackOverflow), and of course memes/macros which add some lighthearted fun to code review. The engineering behind the product is top-notch which is evident from reviewing the tasks/discussions behind features [1], or even reviewing the source code. One killer feature for my company was Spaces, which allows setting up "walled gardens" -- we use it to allow external collaborators to create tasks, etc. without being able to see anything outside their own space. Managing and maintaining Phabricator is pretty straightforward. It's a standard LAMP type of product (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) which is easy for myself or IT to jump on and diagnose issues. It's the only tool I've seen which will also alert administrators to identified issues with configuration (when logged into web page). Additionally administrators of the tool do not have blatant all-access to projects, though that might be niche. I'm glad it's getting more notice now, even if it's largely due to Microsoft acquiring GitHub. I don't know if Facebook uses Phabricator still but WikiMedia does and I belive the Mercurial development team is considering it [2]. Phabricator is a great product and worth trying out. Their community is located at [3] - they used to allow open access to their self-hosted Phabricator instance but it became too noisy as the user base grew so they've moved to discourse forums. [1] https://secure.phabricator.com https://secure.phabricator.com [2] https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/ https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/ [3] https://discourse.phabricator-community.org/ https://discourse.phabricator-community.org/

lima 8y ago
> I don't know if Facebook uses Phabricator still Last time I heard, multiple teams at Facebook are using it.

indescions_2018 8y ago

Lubuntu team uses it as well: https://phab.lubuntu.me/ https://phab.lubuntu.me/

cyberferret 8y ago

Been using Phabricator for a few years now at our SaaS, and it is a great system. Recently really went to town with Herald rules etc., as well as connecting it up to AWS CodeCommit + CodePipeline to review and deploy to our staging server from our 'develop' git branches etc. Very granular control over workflow. Took me a while to get to grips with the 'fun' spelling all over the place though. I know there is a 'serious' mode, but that it way too serious! :)

acidburnNSA 8y ago
You can at least change the spelling on the main page to Tasks and Bugs, Code Review, etc. Agreed that serious business mode is slightly too serious. I miss the acsii dragon when pushes were denied by heralds.

drewg123 8y ago

We use it for FreeBSD. My impression, coming from tools like gerrit, bitbucket/stash, fisheye/crucible and google3 is that phab is a review tool that kind of wants to be a source control tool, but it fails at both. I actually dread putting up reviews when I upstream stuff to FreeBSD because I hate phab. I've found that it is just easier for me to use the "upload patch" feature than it is to use their arcanist tools on top of git or svn. I really wish the project would move away from this tool.

Izkata 8y ago
Several years ago, we also used Phabricator for code reviews. It had just enough friction that eventually our team fell to manual code reviews ("Hey, could you check out revision X?"), then eventually just stopped bothering to code review at all. Since switching to Fisheye/Crucible, code reviews have become so easy we do them all the time as part of the normal workflow. I really can't imagine switching back nowadays.

navd 8y ago

Any opinions on Phabricator vs Gerrit? I'm currently working on a project using the latter.

20after4 8y ago
Wikimedia uses both, unfortunately. They each have their advantages, however, Phabricator has a usable interface while Gerrit is one of the worst GUIs I've ever seen.
guitarbill 8y ago
Gerrit is ugly* and less fully featured, but I love it. It's great for linear master branches. I like the rebase support, it means what I reviewed goes into master, no squashing required. And diffing between rebased patchsets works great and is a killer review feature (most tools get very unhappy when you rebase). It's only really for code review though. No nice web UI for browsing repositories, no issue tracking, etc. This was a plus for us (very unix-y and easy to integrate with existing systems), but could be seen as a negative. * The UI is getting better, and you can tweak the CSS, it's pretty simple.

smakhtin 8y ago

Chronotope.io CTO here. We are using Phabricator as our primary organization tool for the team of 20+ people. Maniphest (task management) was the main reason why we chose Phabricator. I agree that Arcanist can seem complex when you first use it, but after you start to use `arc feature` you never want to go back. We love patch-based workflow and how task management integrated with tasks. I wish Herald to have more integrations, but Phabricator API is quite nice and we built our own integration for Jenkins, similar to what Uber did, but working natively with Jenkins Pipeline.

m4r71n 8y ago

Another option is the one created by the Fedora project: https://pagure.io/pagure https://pagure.io/pagure. It's a Git hosting solution where all the additional bits related to a repo (issues, docs, etc.) are also their own Git repos that can be pulled and pushed into.

donaldguy 8y ago

Yo I love phabricator; it's one of my favorite pieces of software, but three things: 1. The title's seeming attribution to Wikimedia as opposed to Facebook (or even Phacility) is like, whatever the opposite of dog whistling is 2. If you want to host your own things, great; do that. Phab is great, gitlab is also pretty neat. If you want someone to manage this stuff for you, Phacility is out there grindin' but they also have like O(10) employees, so don't expect miracles 3. The point of GitHub was always about "social coding"; the concerns about overcentralization aren't unfounded but it's also not like that wasn't straight up the value proposition in th the first place! If everyone moves off to their own walled gardens, something of value will be lost. So like, again: love phab (it/arc's my favorite code review workflow, I think the conventions it adds on commit messages are really valuable (and btw trace right back to Facebook eng culture), the pretty tight integration of tools is nice, I enjoy its sense of humor), but I think calling it meaningfully a true GitHub alternative, with any consideration of FOSS, is inaccurate Disclosure: I left a startup using phab (at my urging) and GitHub at the end of March and now work at Microsoft (where my team has some code on VSTS and some on GitHub). I first encountered Phab as an intern at FB in 2011, when epreistly had just left

kazinator 8y ago

What would be cool is some peer-to-peer git protocol. Say I have a local repo, but don't host my own domain. Suppose I could run something which connects to the peer-to-peer rendezvous server, which provides a web presence for my repo. Then suppose that the clone URL served by this repo would just put the user in contact with my IP address to do the git clone from me directly. The public server facilitates the contact and provides a presence. Patching this into git would help. Suppose git supported some htt2p://foo.bar/baz URL which connects to foo.bar, and retrieves a special dynamic resource baz which redirects it to the current location of baz; e.g. git://x.y.z.w/whatever/baz

mkirklions 8y ago
Im not a fan of blockchain for most applications, but couldnt this be one? People that want to host code on the internet just need to pay the fee to put it on the internet. Once its there, anyone can download it. Hopefully the fee is trivial, I'm guessing this wouldnt be a problem since it would be less popular than Bitcoin.
- cobalt 8y ago
  git is basically a block chain by design. Both it and bitcoin use variants of a merkle tree
pushtheenvelope 8y ago
you may be interested in Gittorrent. I'll link to the recent HN discussion, since the original article was from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234498 original article: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/ https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto...

sciurus 8y ago

My experience with Phabricator is with the code review system (Differential), rules system (Herald), CLI (Arcanist), and API (Conduit). I can't speak to other functionality like repo hosting or task management. I joined Eventbrite shortly after they moved from Review Board to Phabricator for code review about 4 years ago. It took me a little while to adjust, but once I did I found it to be superior to what Github provided. The CLI provides a nice way to standardize on a workflow company-wide. The UI for composing a review has a few quirks but a lot of functionality, and the patch-based aspect makes it easy to track the evolution of a diff. Herald is very powerful for making sure the right people review a diff. Conduit provided what we need to integrate with Jenkins for CI. Github has gotten better since then, but I'd still lean toward Phabricator as the better tool for code review, especially for larger projects. I eventually partially inherited running Phabricator at Eventbrite, and found it overall to be straightforward to configure and troubleshoot. We were only running a single node and using git for repositories, though. Now I'm at Mozilla, and we recently switched from Review Board to Phabricator for Firefox code review. Some of my teammates run the service, and I know that running a multinode setup with mercurial as the repo format has proven challenging.

deleted 8y ago
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dcosson 8y ago
I only tried out Phabricator briefly, and it was pretty good. But the data model bothered me in how it introduces its own abstraction of patches on top of the git branch model. It seems redundant, and also seems like an SVN-inspired model that just felt like a step backwards from having the power of plain git (as in the ability to create diff objects and branch and rearrange them arbitrarily in a pretty simple way, and have multiple people working on these branches at the same time and keeping in sync with each other). I know you can still use plain git locally with Phabricator, but the extra layer of abstraction seemed to only add complexity since now you basically have different data models locally as you do on the server whereas previously they were the same. And what you gain from it didn't seem big enough to justify this, because at the end of the day you can accomplish a lot of the same things in git (like using the squash & merge strategy in github) without introducing any new primitives. I didn't use it long enough to really figure out if this is a purely aesthetic concern and I'm just being stubborn about the way I'm used to or if it leads to real problems in practice. I'm curious what people who really like Phabricator think about this.

kemayo 8y ago

It says "used by the Wikimedia Foundation" in the title, but that's sort of misleading. We do use Maniphest, the issue tracker component, heavily. And it's pretty great, honestly. I find it to be a useful blend of exposed functionality and ease of use. That said, we don't use Differential, the code review component for most (any?) teams. Instead we're pretty entrenched on gerrit still, and I haven't seen any signs of that changing over the last few years.

20after4 8y ago
Sad but true.

salicideblock 8y ago

I have been using Phabricator for the past couple of years, mainly for code review. I would point out the very wide feature set for a development team, beyond code hosting and review. A couple of times I was thinking " we should set up a web app with this", only to find it with a few clicks that Phabricator already had it. A few gems: - pastebin-like app - Instant chat - task manager with planning None of them are top-of-the class, but it's helpful to have them all in the same setup.

isoos 8y ago

A few years ago I've used Phabricator as an example for "You can write reasonable code in PHP too." I haven't checked it recently, but at that point it was readable, well structured and commented code. Unfortunately I never got around installing and using it, as it heavily relies on PHP installed as command line tool (for preparing a change for pre-submit code review).

ausjke 8y ago

I wish they picked up some different names, anyway at the moment gitea has all I need for personal projects. I wish gitea could be used as a file manager(file explorer), i.e. with folders on the side and I can navigator files and review them easily, sort of like the linux 'ranger' command inside browser, I know this is asking too much.

pdpi 8y ago

I used Phabricator on a daily basis at Facebook, and loved it, after having used it at a previous job where I hated it. The biggest reason for that was that Phabricator is a piece of software that wants to be used in a very particular way, and that is the "you're all in" sort of way. It's not a tool you'll get good results from by timidly testing the water with your toe. One particular manifestation of the prior point is that, for me, it worked best with a one-commit-per-unit-of-work workflow, where stacks can be merged on a commit-by-commit basis and code review issues are addressed by editing the changes into the relevant commits. In Git, making this work is a painful amount of history rewriting that lands you in a world of rebase pain. In Mercurial, you just fix things at the top of the stack and `hg absorb` the changes into their relevant commits. `hg absorb` is, in fact, the one Mercurial command I really wish I had in Git.

davidcuddeback 8y ago

A while back, I chose to migrate my open source projects from GitHub to Phabricator. Having open source projects on GitHub has felt like having an email inbox that's open to the public where there's an expectation to respond to every form of spam. It's been a source of aggravation for me that's taken the fun out of coding on side projects. In my opinion, two out of the three bullet points from Dear GitHub [1] are still unaddressed, but all three are handled by Phabricator. I looked at GitLab, Bitbucket, and Phabricator. I selected Phabricator because it provides more control for moderation and managing workflows and it's 100% open source [2]. Some examples of ways Phabricator can be customized: - Create a custom "New Bug Report" form with fields for reproduction steps, expected results, actual results, software version, operating system, etc. Customized forms are more than just a Markdown template. (This is the first bullet point from Dear GitHub.) - Provide instructions on how to fill out each custom form. You can customize the blurb at the top of each form using Remarkup (similar to Markdown). (This is the third bullet point from Dear GitHub.) - Keep security issues restricted to a private group until they've been resolved. - Default user-reported issues to private until they've been triaged. (This could help alleviate the expectation to publicly reply to all spam.) - Require users to acknowledge the contributing guidelines before submitting a feature request. - Access to forms can be customized with ACL groups, which can be used to moderate spam by granting or revoking access to features based on users' behavior. - Require signing a CLA or DCO before submitting a patch. This has first-class support since Phacility requires a CLA for contributions to Phabricator. - Tasks can have subtypes, such as "feature" and "bug." (You can also do this with "project" tags, but I think Phacility's plan is to use subtypes to extend the custom fields functionality.) Phabricator also has some nice extras that weren't part of my decision criteria: - It has a built-in blogging application (Phame), which could be used to publish release notes or important changes (e.g., "Upcoming Breaking Changes in v2.0"). A feed of these news items can be added to a custom dashboard along with commit and task activity to help users keep up to date. - A built-in polling application (Slowvote) can be used to solicit feedback. - A Q&A app (Ponder) could be used to help answer users' questions without cluttering the issue tracker. Unfortunately, this app currently lacks some customization and moderation capabilities. - Paste is for sharing snippets (similar to Gist). - Flags can be used to bookmark anything you want to remember to come back to with an attached note. - Pholio is a review tool for mockups. I probably won't need this for my peronsal projects, but I thought it was a cool idea. Phabricator comes with some trade-offs. The downsides that I've noticed: - There isn't a good hosted option for open source projects. Phacility provides hosting at $20/user/month, but if you have to pay $20/month for every user that signs up to file an issue, that's financially unviable for an open source project. Personally, I prefer self-hosting, so this isn't an issue for me. I'm mentioning it because I know others will prefer a hosted solution. - Navigating the UI isn't as smooth out of the box. Some common tasks require an extra click or two compared to GitHub or GitLab. Some of it can be alleviated by customizing the places where you want a direct link. For example, you can add a link to a repository in a project's sidebar. (Projects are independent of repositories, so they're not automatically linked.) - It's meant to be customized, so it's not as simple as just install it and start using it right away. It takes some time to setup and migrate projects. - Many of the tools that aren't core functionality (repos, tasks, code review) are MVP quality. This includes the CI tool (Harbormaster) [3], the Q&A app (Ponder), and the human intelligence queue (Nuance) [4] among others. - Phacility's focus is on enterprise customers, so it's not clear how issues that are unique to open source projects will be prioritized. I haven't seen this be a problem and it's used by some prominent open source projects (FreeBSD, GnuPG, Wikimedia), but it's worth mentioning as a possibility. I've been playing around with Phabricator on a FreeBSD instance on DigitalOcean. For anyone else considering Phabricator, note that the page response time is greatly affected by the instance type that you choose. A standard droplet on DigitalOcean or any of the VC2 instances on Vultr provided about a 1 second response time (measured by Nginx's $request_time in the logs). A CPU optimized droplet on DigitalOcean provides about a 100 millisecond response time and results in a noticably more responsive UI. I can't speak to the response time on EC2 instances, because I've only tried hosting providers with first-class FreeBSD support. [1] https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github [2] "No special editions. Everything included, open and free" (https://phacility.com/phabricator/ https://phacility.com/phabricator/). [3] The documentation for Harbormaster says that all it's really good for is to notify an external CI system (Jenkins, Buildbot, etc) to trigger a build and then to receive build results. It doesn't have any built-in capability of running builds. [4] Nuance seems like it has potential as a triage queue for user-reported feature requests and bug reports, but it currently lacks the necessary customization. (Edited for formatting.)

bsimpson 8y ago

The stack-based workflow in Phabricator makes so much more sense to me than GitHub's branch-and-PR model. I've never understood how people can be productive in GitHub for anything beyond minor changes.

partycoder 8y ago

If the main focus is code reviewing, I would rather try Gerrit / Gitiles instead. It is less invasive, doesn't include issue tracking.

amaccuish 8y ago

The humour of the front page got me interested. Looks good (y)

sho_hn 8y ago

We use Phabricator at KDE, too, with many hundreds of contributors. Currently mostly for code review and task planning, which we're happy with, outside some nav woes with Pholio. We haven't retired Bugzilla for issue tracking yet, though.

verigit 8y ago

If you are on a mac, another alternative is EasyGit (https://easygit.me https://easygit.me). It is just the git hosting part (i.e. no issues, wikis, etc) but you just pay for the app, there are no on-going subscriptions. EasyGit stores your repos privately on iCloud and it doesn't use any 3rd party servers or analytics. In fact its sandbox doesn't allow any outgoing network connections, apart from talking to iCloud. Disclaimer: This is my app and btw I'm running a WWDC promotion and you can download it for free till Friday: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easygit/id1228242832?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easygit/id1228242832?mt=12

littledot5566 8y ago

I really wish Phabricator Tasks could have custom statuses and not just "Open/Close". This would make the Workboard feature so much more useful.

neandrake 8y ago
How do you mean? Custom statuses can be configured if you visit `/config/edit/maniphest.statuses/`. It's also pretty well documented how to customize statuses there.
aseipp 8y ago
You can do this. Go to Config > Application Settings > Maniphest and use the "maniphest.statuses" option. The amount of control is actually rather nice.

aidenn0 8y ago

I've used Phabricator along side github; you can have it track any external git repository, and use its task tracking and code auditing tools, both of which are much better than github (Github's CI integrations are much better though, fwiw). The value added by github is primarily that you can get drive-by patches submitted because it's become the tool that so many developers both already know how to use and already have an accountse. Phabricator is much more focused on providing value to set teams working on a project, and it does that really, really well.

soulnothing 8y ago

I was a heavy user of Phabricator 2014 -> 2017. Spinning it up internally at work for code reviews. Ticketing, project management etc. It was nice that everything was tied together. Wiki, code reviews, sprints, etc. It was one common application. That could easily link back to one another. The idea of tying a repository to a specific project was great. As was being able to in-line issues directly in a pull request. However when I went to spin up a new project, and stack for myself, earlier this year. I went through the major options and settled on GitLab. I'm doing this on the public site, with public repositories. So can't speak to the pains of self-hosting. But phabricator I think is still a great alternative if you want to use it on site. Another benefit is being able to mix and match source control systems

lamby 8y ago

"Set sail for adventure..."