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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, G
by 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.
- transitivebs 8y agoYes, most of Facebook is still using a modified version of Phabricator.
- mic47 8y agoFacebook is using internal fork of phabricator (with facebook specific modification) for (almost) all the code-review (there might be exceptions). It's much better code-review tool than github.