Introduction to Phabricator

Introduction to Phabricator

Artur Nowak

The slide deck is accessible at http://synaway.github.com/intro-to-phabricator (source at http://github.com/synaway/intro-to-phabricator)

The agenda

• What Phabricator is and what it is not
• Short overview of components of Phabricator suite
• Audits vs. revisions
• How Phabricator is used by the GDT team
• Demo time

Phabricator

• Suite of tools developed (first internally) by Facebook
• Used by some big companies (especially by teams consisting of former Facebook engineers)
• Optimized for heavy customization, command-line usage and ability to install it nearly everywhere
• Characterized by absurd humor (which can be turned off by switching to 'serious business' mode)

Phabricator components

• Phriction
• Maniphest
• Pholio
• Diffusion
• Differential
• Others (Phame, Ponder, Phrequent, Slowvote...)

Audits vs. revisions

• Pre-commit vs. post-commit reviews
• Audits (in Diffusion) are for post-commit reviews
• Revisions (in Differential) are for pre-commit reviews
• What is better? As always, it depends

Use of Phabricator in the GDT team

• Maniphest for technical debt and bug reports
• Started to use Pholio for mocks
• Every change is going through Differential (unless we have 'unbreak now' issue and there is nobody to review it or it's a purely infrastructural change)
• Custom lint engine with adapter for CoffeLint (open sourced on github.com
• Plans to add test coverage integration soon

Demo time

• We will be setting a project up from very start
• Installing Arcanist and configuring it for the project
• Adding tasks, and going through the code review
• Setting up a custom lint engine
• You can join now or experiment with it later: ssh://hg@svn/training/phabricator-demo