9 ms·

Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

121 points by asb 12y ago

ausjke 12y ago
Every time I saw a project management tool I instantly want to compare it to redmine which is based on Ruby. I failed to see obvious advantages from Phabricator yet.
- debacle 12y ago
  Phabricator is way better if most of your users are readonly. It's also more actively developed and is a bit faster.
- adamors 12y ago
  Seriously, Redmine is your standard? It has to be one of the clunkiest, slowest and all around uncomfortable project management tools out there. We use it at our place of work, and out of 30+ developers, only a handful of people are content with it.
  - leonardinius 12y ago
    What would you recommend / advise then?
    - sogen 12y ago
      At our company we are about to decide between these two: VersionOne and TargetProcess. I'm not affiliated to them.
    - adamors 12y ago
      I honestly don't know. We've been also using Jira but it doesn't cover all of Redmine's features.
      - leonardinius 12y ago
        Same here. I've been Jira user / Jira consultant for some time (around 3.x - 4.x versions). And I loved the tool then. I don't have the same sentiment any more and mostly find it bloated. At the moment I'm daily Redmine and YouTrack[1] user and find both of them much more superior. Personally I think YT is one of the most user friendly tools out there, but I also find it quite limited and lacking (especially in regards to reporting and time management). However it seems it's being addressed with 6.x version (it's still not at the point I would like it to be, but hopefully the trend will continue). At the moment I don't see any viable and full-featured alternatives to Redmine frankly, which is disappointing. I like the tool, however it could be more user friendly (modern) and easier to maintain (at least for non Ruby guy). I'm considering to give a OpenProject[2] a trial demo someday, maybe things are better there (basically it's another Redmine fork). Regarding Redmine performance - yes it could be better. However it my experience it does scale quite decently (e.g. Jira used to have major problems with it, please bear in mind my experience with the tool is ~3 years old, hopefully it's somewhere addressed currently). In one of our Redmine setups we have around 41k issues and we do not experience any major problems with it. [1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ [2]: https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/
        ausjke 12y ago
        openproject is a redmine derivative, good to know its existence and will give it a try someday.
        jansh 12y ago
        I agree that Redmine can be a bit hard to maintain at times which is why we created Planio[1] in case anyone's interested. (shameless plug ;-) ) [1] https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/ https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/
        leonardinius 12y ago
        We used to use your service in one point of time and I must say we loved it. Actually, a colleague of mine was asking me what services I could recommend for his new venture and all I was able to come up at the time was: - Want to manage it yourself? Use Redmine on DigitalOcean - SaaS?, then Planio will get you covered.
    - vaceletm 12y ago
      If you are looking for something that does "more than just git" and if being open source is valuable to you, you can have a look at Tuleap[1]. It comes with git and svn for source control, built-in tracking technology (big difference with redmine/jira, anyone can customize models & workflows), code review with gerrit, agile dashboard for scrum (kanban on going). Last but not least, it does scale quite well (10k users, 200k tickets, TB of git repo, ...) Full disclosure: I'm dev on that very tool. [1] http://tuleap.org http://tuleap.org
      - touristtam 12y ago
        I am more or less in the market (and evaluating) such tool suite and I must admit that I am pretty impressed at what you have here. However if I can find one downside of the UI is the lack of sheen; things that other tools out there (that get often 'promoted' on HN have). anyway Thanks for sharing. :)
        vaceletm 12y ago
        Agreed, there is a huge work on going on the UI side and the screenshot gallery doesnt really represent the amount of work done. It's a bit better when you look at it live[1] but the road is long. However, the on going work start on strong bases, for instance for Kanban[2]. [1] https://tuleap.net/plugins/agiledashboard/?group_id=101 https://tuleap.net/plugins/agiledashboard/?group_id=101 [2] https://tuleap.net/plugins/tracker/?aid=7574 https://tuleap.net/plugins/tracker/?aid=7574
      - annnnd 12y ago
        Looks nice! A hint though: I was looking for an open source tool and I didn't stumble across yours, so you might want to put some effort in SEO, presence on blogs,... I find the information on your download page (https://www.tuleap.org/try-and-go https://www.tuleap.org/try-and-go) a bit confusing. What do you charge for? I need to know that up-front before investing my time... There are many products which are "free" until you need some (basic) functionality. Also, you might want to check spelling on that (and probably other) page(s), but I don't personally mind that. :)
- SEJeff 12y ago
  It has code review that doesn't suck. Redmine is wonderful for issues, but it has no sane code review bits. Also, the gitolite plugin is horrible (I've had to hack several bits of it to work), and there is no really good way to do fine grained access control for your repos. This is all out of the box stuff you get with phabricator. It does those bits exceptionally well. The niceties you get with redmine, such as referencing commits or issues and autoclosing them on code push also exists with phabricator. Think of phabricator as a more meme friendly superset of redmine.
  - ausjke 12y ago
    It took a while to set up but Redmine Git Hosting Plugin worked well for me on gitolite-based repos. The web git-diff from Redmine's git kind of helps code-review but it's indeed not ideal. I wish redmine is written in PHP so I don't need run Ruby, as all my other server software are in PHP. otherwise, Redmine rules.
brokentone 12y ago
Confusing title - this is the (formerly) Facebook Phabricator project that Wikimedia is now using, not something they built from scratch.
- asb 12y ago
  I submitted it with the title "Wikimedia has completed its migration from Bugzilla to Phabricator".
  - brokentone 12y ago
    That would be much better
    - chris_wot 12y ago
      Perhaps the mod might like to put it back to its less misleading title?
dominotw 12y ago
meh...
keeperofdakeys 12y ago
I've been using the code review portions recently. The pre-commit workflow doesn't work too well with git, since the review happens before you upload the code. So everyone needs a local php program to both upload code diffs, and download the code diffs (to support multiple VCS systems). And once it's approved, you need to merge and push it locally (there is a command in the program to do this in one step). Writing unit tests also requires making (a small) php program to call out to them. And from what I've seen, it only supports them locally, and not through another system. There is a post-commit review system, but it has less features, and is based only on commits. But after looking around, there really wasn't much else that fulfilled the project-management aspects as well as code-review.
- nbm 12y ago
  I'm a little confused by what you mean by "the review happens before you upload the code"? Can you explain what you thought should happen vs. what does happen? Thanks!
  - gcb0 12y ago
    i guess he want something that compares remote forks a la github, instead of a patch uploader that is agnostic to where you store your repos
- cribwi 12y ago
  I've been using Phabricator for almost a year now in our company. At first, I also had my questions about the workflow with arcanist (the local PHP cli software to interact with Phabricator). However, right now I really love it and miss it on every repository which works without Phabricator. Commands like 'arc feature', 'arc tasks' and 'arc inlines' provide a solid abstraction over the repository to bring the workflow to the cli. About the unit tests: indeed, out-of-the-box Phabricator only supports running them locally (you can configure the unit engine to run every time a piece of code is been send into review). Luckily, it's not that hard to hook into the event engine (https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/events/ https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/even...) to, for example, trigger your CI-server to run the test suite for a specific revision. Also, Phabricator is still being developed actively. There are a bunch of alpha and beta applications which will only make it more powerful (for example: DryDock and Harbormaster, which will ease the work for automatic builds: http://www.guywarner.com/2014/05/integrating-jenkins-and-phabricator.html http://www.guywarner.com/2014/05/integrating-jenkins-and-pha...) In my opinion, Phabricator is one of the most powerful tools around for doing code reviews and effective collaboration management. Even with the large amount of beta applications (which are promising in many cases) the decision for us was easy to make.
sophiebits 12y ago
Phabricator rocks, primarily as a code review tool – we've been using it at Khan Academy since 2012. It's sad how much better it is than GitHub PRs, especially for a large team. I'm looking forward to watching it continue to grow. :)
- chralieboy 12y ago
  Could you elaborate on its benefits vs. GitHub? Having used Phabricator in production for over a year and a half, I have been consistently disappointed by its horrendous user experience, lack of integrations, and overall difficulty of use. Compared to GitHub, it has really been night and day.
  - spicyj 12y ago
    GitHub doesn't have a way to assign reviews to more than one person or to see the code reviews that you need to take action on (meaning code you need to review or reviews you authored that need updating, without showing reviews that you're waiting for another person on) on a single repo, let alone across all repos. GitHub's emails are incredibly noisy to the point that I'm reluctant to make inline comments for fear of spamming people's inboxes. When someone updates a PR, it's hard to see what's changed since the last version you saw. Phabricator also has other niceties like syntax highlighting within diffs, two-column diffs (which admittedly GitHub added about a month ago), and a solid command-line tool ("arc") for sending off reviews, etc.
    - chralieboy 12y ago
      GitHub does have the ability to assign to (https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-requests-to-other-github-users/ https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-r...) and filter by assignee (https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-requests-by-assignees/ https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-r...). If you want to pull in multiple reviewers, you can @mention them. Even in Phabricator, though, when you have multiple reviewers only one has to accept for it to be accepted. Oftentimes it is _more_ confusing to have multiple reviewers because you don't know who should have the final say. Github has Hub (https://github.com/github/hub https://github.com/github/hub) which is as powerful, if not more so, than arc. The commenting system is a matter of preference, but having forgotten to "Clowncopterize" (a great demonstration of the professionalism of those who hack on Phabricator) comments, and given that they thread in email, it hasn't been a problem for me. Though I understand where you're coming from.
preillyme 12y ago
This is really good news for the Phacility folks... for sure. Nice work folks.
yid 12y ago
Phabricator is a legend within Facebook. For an example of some truly funny marketing copy, check out its homepage: http://phabricator.org/ http://phabricator.org/
- GFischer 12y ago
  You weren't kidding, I like that kind of self-deprecating humor :)
  - zaven 12y ago
    Evan Priestley (main lead developer from the article) is hilarious. He's also responsible for this fantastic description http://www.javelinjs.com/ http://www.javelinjs.com/
    - syaz1 12y ago
      Can't tell if the hacked ribbon is serious or part of the joke...
      - zaven 12y ago
        Part of the joke! He gives the backstory here http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-story-behind-Javelins-hilarious-website http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-story-behind-Javelins-hilario...
languagehacker 12y ago
It's too bad they didn't use this as an opportunity to ditch Gerrit. Gerrit is terrible, and now they essentially have two code review platforms.
- kouiskas 12y ago
  It will happen later: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator#Migration_timeline https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator#Migration_timelin...
- yuvipanda 12y ago
  We don't actually use phabricator for code review yet :) It just replaced RT and bugzilla (and hopefully mingle). Gerrit migration happening over the next few months, pending community consultation.
tachion 12y ago
Interestingly, the FreeBSD project also started using Phabricator as a code review tool, under reviews.freebsd.org. As of now its only used by committers and developers, but there is work being done to open it for the wide audience.
- techdragon 12y ago
  It's a shame FreeBSD can't move more things to Phabricator. The bigger the project the better having all the pieces in one tool makes things. Relating code changes to issues and tasks being the most obvious.
quadrangle 12y ago
Why does Phabricator's own site (phabricator.org) link to their own source on GitHub? If Phabricator is great for code hosting, shouldn't they be hosting their own code with it?
- dfullarton 12y ago
  Phabricator isn't code hosting, it's repository viewing. The code is still hosted in whatever existing SCM tool is being used. It does have a lot of features that overlap with github which is why it is a bit confusing.
  - epriest 12y ago
    Phabricator does have code hosting, and the Phabricator master repository is self-hosted on Phabricator and mirrored to GitHub. We link to GitHub because they have more infrastructure than we do for handling heavy read loads.
    - dfullarton 12y ago
      How is the code hosting done in the backend, do you reuse git or is there something bespoke in action back there?
      - epriest 12y ago
        Underlying writes go to Git, Mercurial and SVN. Generally speaking, we proxy requests and pass them through to the VCS after performing authentication and broad permission checks. Requests are rewritten slightly to remap user-facing display paths to actual paths on disk. Some additional features act through commit hooks.
bkanber 12y ago
I introduced Phabricator to my company about 9 months ago. The trick with Phabricator is that each individual applet/tool is a little bit janky. Taken individually, there are better ticket management tools, better wikis, better code review tools, etc. But Phabricator's power is in the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. As a unified ecosystem we've found huge power in our code reviews living next to our wiki living next to our user stories living next to our wireframes (pholio). And yes -- even the business, operations, and account management departments are using it now too!
- techdragon 12y ago
  This is why it's my new standard for this kind of tool. Having a single unified system for all this stuff is so much better than the patchwork of things I used to have to maintain.
  - ausjke 12y ago
    And that's why I am using Redmine, who has pretty everything a development team needs. Will check this one soon.
aidenn0 12y ago
I started playing around with phabricator a few months ago. It was by far the easiest web application install I've ever done, and works really well. The only downside is that it doesn't allow you to do code review via git pull request. It originally was just SVN, but now has git and hg support, and it uses the same code-review tool for all of them, so it's a bit less git-centric than github. That being said, they have a command line tool for submitting pre-push code reviews that is really really nice. I haven't figured out a way to easily do a github pull-request from the command line (though I'm sure there's a tool to do ti somewhere).
contingencies 12y ago
Evaluated this when it was still a Facebook project. Decided not to use it as too hacky what with the arc stuff, what looked like weird technical-debt-laden feature creep, and a PITA install. Glad to hear they've fixed the install and they're cleaning it up. Might take another look. Incidentally, arc offers some cool command line features: https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/arcanist/#overview https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/arca...
jamwt 12y ago
Dropbox uses Phabricator extensively for all our projects. Integrations into CI and deployment systems, etc. Great project. I've used trac, redmine, bugzilla, github/github enterprise, over the last ~10 years, and taken across the whole feature set, Phabricator outshines all of them. All the integrations across the product suite are nice, and the arc tool is really convenient once you get used to its quirks. It's not the simplest thing in the world, but if you have a bigger shop with some nontrivial workflows, lots of projects, lots of teams, blocking reviews, mandatory security reviews, etc... Phabricator is a great way to wrangle it.

121 points by asb 12y ago

Every time I saw a project management tool I instantly want to compare it to redmine which is based on Ruby. I failed to see obvious advantages from Phabricator yet.

debacle 12y ago
Phabricator is way better if most of your users are readonly. It's also more actively developed and is a bit faster.
adamors 12y ago
Seriously, Redmine is your standard? It has to be one of the clunkiest, slowest and all around uncomfortable project management tools out there. We use it at our place of work, and out of 30+ developers, only a handful of people are content with it.
- leonardinius 12y ago
  What would you recommend / advise then?
  - sogen 12y ago
    At our company we are about to decide between these two: VersionOne and TargetProcess. I'm not affiliated to them.
  - adamors 12y ago
    I honestly don't know. We've been also using Jira but it doesn't cover all of Redmine's features.
    - leonardinius 12y ago
      Same here. I've been Jira user / Jira consultant for some time (around 3.x - 4.x versions). And I loved the tool then. I don't have the same sentiment any more and mostly find it bloated. At the moment I'm daily Redmine and YouTrack[1] user and find both of them much more superior. Personally I think YT is one of the most user friendly tools out there, but I also find it quite limited and lacking (especially in regards to reporting and time management). However it seems it's being addressed with 6.x version (it's still not at the point I would like it to be, but hopefully the trend will continue). At the moment I don't see any viable and full-featured alternatives to Redmine frankly, which is disappointing. I like the tool, however it could be more user friendly (modern) and easier to maintain (at least for non Ruby guy). I'm considering to give a OpenProject[2] a trial demo someday, maybe things are better there (basically it's another Redmine fork). Regarding Redmine performance - yes it could be better. However it my experience it does scale quite decently (e.g. Jira used to have major problems with it, please bear in mind my experience with the tool is ~3 years old, hopefully it's somewhere addressed currently). In one of our Redmine setups we have around 41k issues and we do not experience any major problems with it. [1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ [2]: https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/
      - ausjke 12y ago
        openproject is a redmine derivative, good to know its existence and will give it a try someday.
      - jansh 12y ago
        I agree that Redmine can be a bit hard to maintain at times which is why we created Planio[1] in case anyone's interested. (shameless plug ;-) ) [1] https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/ https://plan.io/redmine-hosting/
        leonardinius 12y ago
        We used to use your service in one point of time and I must say we loved it. Actually, a colleague of mine was asking me what services I could recommend for his new venture and all I was able to come up at the time was: - Want to manage it yourself? Use Redmine on DigitalOcean - SaaS?, then Planio will get you covered.
  - vaceletm 12y ago
    If you are looking for something that does "more than just git" and if being open source is valuable to you, you can have a look at Tuleap[1]. It comes with git and svn for source control, built-in tracking technology (big difference with redmine/jira, anyone can customize models & workflows), code review with gerrit, agile dashboard for scrum (kanban on going). Last but not least, it does scale quite well (10k users, 200k tickets, TB of git repo, ...) Full disclosure: I'm dev on that very tool. [1] http://tuleap.org http://tuleap.org
    - touristtam 12y ago
      I am more or less in the market (and evaluating) such tool suite and I must admit that I am pretty impressed at what you have here. However if I can find one downside of the UI is the lack of sheen; things that other tools out there (that get often 'promoted' on HN have). anyway Thanks for sharing. :)
      - vaceletm 12y ago
        Agreed, there is a huge work on going on the UI side and the screenshot gallery doesnt really represent the amount of work done. It's a bit better when you look at it live[1] but the road is long. However, the on going work start on strong bases, for instance for Kanban[2]. [1] https://tuleap.net/plugins/agiledashboard/?group_id=101 https://tuleap.net/plugins/agiledashboard/?group_id=101 [2] https://tuleap.net/plugins/tracker/?aid=7574 https://tuleap.net/plugins/tracker/?aid=7574
    - annnnd 12y ago
      Looks nice! A hint though: I was looking for an open source tool and I didn't stumble across yours, so you might want to put some effort in SEO, presence on blogs,... I find the information on your download page (https://www.tuleap.org/try-and-go https://www.tuleap.org/try-and-go) a bit confusing. What do you charge for? I need to know that up-front before investing my time... There are many products which are "free" until you need some (basic) functionality. Also, you might want to check spelling on that (and probably other) page(s), but I don't personally mind that. :)
SEJeff 12y ago
It has code review that doesn't suck. Redmine is wonderful for issues, but it has no sane code review bits. Also, the gitolite plugin is horrible (I've had to hack several bits of it to work), and there is no really good way to do fine grained access control for your repos. This is all out of the box stuff you get with phabricator. It does those bits exceptionally well. The niceties you get with redmine, such as referencing commits or issues and autoclosing them on code push also exists with phabricator. Think of phabricator as a more meme friendly superset of redmine.
- ausjke 12y ago
  It took a while to set up but Redmine Git Hosting Plugin worked well for me on gitolite-based repos. The web git-diff from Redmine's git kind of helps code-review but it's indeed not ideal. I wish redmine is written in PHP so I don't need run Ruby, as all my other server software are in PHP. otherwise, Redmine rules.

brokentone 12y ago

Confusing title - this is the (formerly) Facebook Phabricator project that Wikimedia is now using, not something they built from scratch.

asb 12y ago
I submitted it with the title "Wikimedia has completed its migration from Bugzilla to Phabricator".
- brokentone 12y ago
  That would be much better
  - chris_wot 12y ago
    Perhaps the mod might like to put it back to its less misleading title?

dominotw 12y ago

meh...

keeperofdakeys 12y ago

I've been using the code review portions recently. The pre-commit workflow doesn't work too well with git, since the review happens before you upload the code. So everyone needs a local php program to both upload code diffs, and download the code diffs (to support multiple VCS systems). And once it's approved, you need to merge and push it locally (there is a command in the program to do this in one step). Writing unit tests also requires making (a small) php program to call out to them. And from what I've seen, it only supports them locally, and not through another system. There is a post-commit review system, but it has less features, and is based only on commits. But after looking around, there really wasn't much else that fulfilled the project-management aspects as well as code-review.

nbm 12y ago
I'm a little confused by what you mean by "the review happens before you upload the code"? Can you explain what you thought should happen vs. what does happen? Thanks!
- gcb0 12y ago
  i guess he want something that compares remote forks a la github, instead of a patch uploader that is agnostic to where you store your repos
cribwi 12y ago
I've been using Phabricator for almost a year now in our company. At first, I also had my questions about the workflow with arcanist (the local PHP cli software to interact with Phabricator). However, right now I really love it and miss it on every repository which works without Phabricator. Commands like 'arc feature', 'arc tasks' and 'arc inlines' provide a solid abstraction over the repository to bring the workflow to the cli. About the unit tests: indeed, out-of-the-box Phabricator only supports running them locally (you can configure the unit engine to run every time a piece of code is been send into review). Luckily, it's not that hard to hook into the event engine (https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/events/ https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/even...) to, for example, trigger your CI-server to run the test suite for a specific revision. Also, Phabricator is still being developed actively. There are a bunch of alpha and beta applications which will only make it more powerful (for example: DryDock and Harbormaster, which will ease the work for automatic builds: http://www.guywarner.com/2014/05/integrating-jenkins-and-phabricator.html http://www.guywarner.com/2014/05/integrating-jenkins-and-pha...) In my opinion, Phabricator is one of the most powerful tools around for doing code reviews and effective collaboration management. Even with the large amount of beta applications (which are promising in many cases) the decision for us was easy to make.

sophiebits 12y ago

Phabricator rocks, primarily as a code review tool – we've been using it at Khan Academy since 2012. It's sad how much better it is than GitHub PRs, especially for a large team. I'm looking forward to watching it continue to grow. :)

chralieboy 12y ago
Could you elaborate on its benefits vs. GitHub? Having used Phabricator in production for over a year and a half, I have been consistently disappointed by its horrendous user experience, lack of integrations, and overall difficulty of use. Compared to GitHub, it has really been night and day.
- spicyj 12y ago
  GitHub doesn't have a way to assign reviews to more than one person or to see the code reviews that you need to take action on (meaning code you need to review or reviews you authored that need updating, without showing reviews that you're waiting for another person on) on a single repo, let alone across all repos. GitHub's emails are incredibly noisy to the point that I'm reluctant to make inline comments for fear of spamming people's inboxes. When someone updates a PR, it's hard to see what's changed since the last version you saw. Phabricator also has other niceties like syntax highlighting within diffs, two-column diffs (which admittedly GitHub added about a month ago), and a solid command-line tool ("arc") for sending off reviews, etc.
  - chralieboy 12y ago
    GitHub does have the ability to assign to (https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-requests-to-other-github-users/ https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-r...) and filter by assignee (https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-requests-by-assignees/ https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-r...). If you want to pull in multiple reviewers, you can @mention them. Even in Phabricator, though, when you have multiple reviewers only one has to accept for it to be accepted. Oftentimes it is _more_ confusing to have multiple reviewers because you don't know who should have the final say. Github has Hub (https://github.com/github/hub https://github.com/github/hub) which is as powerful, if not more so, than arc. The commenting system is a matter of preference, but having forgotten to "Clowncopterize" (a great demonstration of the professionalism of those who hack on Phabricator) comments, and given that they thread in email, it hasn't been a problem for me. Though I understand where you're coming from.

preillyme 12y ago

This is really good news for the Phacility folks... for sure. Nice work folks.

yid 12y ago

Phabricator is a legend within Facebook. For an example of some truly funny marketing copy, check out its homepage: http://phabricator.org/ http://phabricator.org/

GFischer 12y ago
You weren't kidding, I like that kind of self-deprecating humor :)
- zaven 12y ago
  Evan Priestley (main lead developer from the article) is hilarious. He's also responsible for this fantastic description http://www.javelinjs.com/ http://www.javelinjs.com/
  - syaz1 12y ago
    Can't tell if the hacked ribbon is serious or part of the joke...
    - zaven 12y ago
      Part of the joke! He gives the backstory here http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-story-behind-Javelins-hilarious-website http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-story-behind-Javelins-hilario...

languagehacker 12y ago

It's too bad they didn't use this as an opportunity to ditch Gerrit. Gerrit is terrible, and now they essentially have two code review platforms.

kouiskas 12y ago
It will happen later: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator#Migration_timeline https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator#Migration_timelin...
yuvipanda 12y ago
We don't actually use phabricator for code review yet :) It just replaced RT and bugzilla (and hopefully mingle). Gerrit migration happening over the next few months, pending community consultation.

tachion 12y ago

Interestingly, the FreeBSD project also started using Phabricator as a code review tool, under reviews.freebsd.org. As of now its only used by committers and developers, but there is work being done to open it for the wide audience.

techdragon 12y ago
It's a shame FreeBSD can't move more things to Phabricator. The bigger the project the better having all the pieces in one tool makes things. Relating code changes to issues and tasks being the most obvious.

quadrangle 12y ago

Why does Phabricator's own site (phabricator.org) link to their own source on GitHub? If Phabricator is great for code hosting, shouldn't they be hosting their own code with it?

dfullarton 12y ago
Phabricator isn't code hosting, it's repository viewing. The code is still hosted in whatever existing SCM tool is being used. It does have a lot of features that overlap with github which is why it is a bit confusing.
- epriest 12y ago
  Phabricator does have code hosting, and the Phabricator master repository is self-hosted on Phabricator and mirrored to GitHub. We link to GitHub because they have more infrastructure than we do for handling heavy read loads.
  - dfullarton 12y ago
    How is the code hosting done in the backend, do you reuse git or is there something bespoke in action back there?
    - epriest 12y ago
      Underlying writes go to Git, Mercurial and SVN. Generally speaking, we proxy requests and pass them through to the VCS after performing authentication and broad permission checks. Requests are rewritten slightly to remap user-facing display paths to actual paths on disk. Some additional features act through commit hooks.

bkanber 12y ago

I introduced Phabricator to my company about 9 months ago. The trick with Phabricator is that each individual applet/tool is a little bit janky. Taken individually, there are better ticket management tools, better wikis, better code review tools, etc. But Phabricator's power is in the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. As a unified ecosystem we've found huge power in our code reviews living next to our wiki living next to our user stories living next to our wireframes (pholio). And yes -- even the business, operations, and account management departments are using it now too!

techdragon 12y ago
This is why it's my new standard for this kind of tool. Having a single unified system for all this stuff is so much better than the patchwork of things I used to have to maintain.
- ausjke 12y ago
  And that's why I am using Redmine, who has pretty everything a development team needs. Will check this one soon.

aidenn0 12y ago

I started playing around with phabricator a few months ago. It was by far the easiest web application install I've ever done, and works really well. The only downside is that it doesn't allow you to do code review via git pull request. It originally was just SVN, but now has git and hg support, and it uses the same code-review tool for all of them, so it's a bit less git-centric than github. That being said, they have a command line tool for submitting pre-push code reviews that is really really nice. I haven't figured out a way to easily do a github pull-request from the command line (though I'm sure there's a tool to do ti somewhere).

contingencies 12y ago

Evaluated this when it was still a Facebook project. Decided not to use it as too hacky what with the arc stuff, what looked like weird technical-debt-laden feature creep, and a PITA install. Glad to hear they've fixed the install and they're cleaning it up. Might take another look. Incidentally, arc offers some cool command line features: https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/arcanist/#overview https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/arca...

jamwt 12y ago

Dropbox uses Phabricator extensively for all our projects. Integrations into CI and deployment systems, etc. Great project. I've used trac, redmine, bugzilla, github/github enterprise, over the last ~10 years, and taken across the whole feature set, Phabricator outshines all of them. All the integrations across the product suite are nice, and the arc tool is really convenient once you get used to its quirks. It's not the simplest thing in the world, but if you have a bigger shop with some nontrivial workflows, lots of projects, lots of teams, blocking reviews, mandatory security reviews, etc... Phabricator is a great way to wrangle it.