Comment by krob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krob | Hacker News Reader

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I highly recommend people consider self-hosting with phabricator. It's php-based, and if you have a ESXi or proxmox or digital ocean / linode instance, it's a very simple system to install & update, uses all the same LAMP stack everyone is used to, supports ssh/http based push/pull workflows, git,svn,mecurial repos, same type of authentication as github/gitlab/bitbucket, but biggest part of all, its PHP based, written to a very high standard through & through. Has the ability to scale insane amount of workers & cluster configurations. I've never had it once hiccup on me. Yes, if you import a project with hundred thousand+ commits, it will take a while to import, because it builds records for the entire commit history of the repo, it doesn't generate them the moment you view. So this will take time to back populate into the phabricator system, but once you have an imported repo, it has event system that is unlike any you may have ever used. It takes some time to get used to it, but organizations like CircleCI have a tutorial on how to integrate simple CI workflow using Harbomaster. https://circleci.com/docs/1.0/phabricator/ Also as of php7.x phabricator runs even faster than ever before. It also has it's own Trello Board style system, and it has a much more powerful issue system than gitlab/github. Tickets can have parent/children, and repos never specifically belong to any one project, but rather projects can have many repos. It also has integration with 2FA. It has a Question & Answers section, wiki, pre-code-commit audits. Lot of really big open source communities use it. A fairly large list of big companies using it are shown on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator

> but biggest part of all, its PHP based, written to a very high standard through & through

What?! Holy shit. Is that considered a positive thing these days?! I must be quite out of the damn loop.

PHP applications are extremely easy to install and keep running, and Phabricator is probably the cream of the crop in terms of code quality. The devs have done an incredible job with it.

So the answer is "it can be" considered a positive thing.

Well, there's nothing wrong with using PHP, and the performance is often better than with other comparable options. Personally I really enjoy PHP 7.

If you're way out of the loop then all you need to know is that PHP 7 is quite awesome.

You can write clean code in any language, and I've written some nice PHP, but the language itself has many fundamental design problems. For example, printf shouldn't have side-effects on a datetime object:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=75232

I run some OSS stuff on PHP, but in containers to keep it all isolated. Although things have gotten better with PHP7, knowing what I know about the language makes me hesitant to use it on any new project for anything except the most trivial systems.

That should definetly be fixed, but it's not something people will ever experience unless they try to write broken code by using undocumented features/sideeffects.

What exactly is it you know about the language that makes you hesitant to use it?

It's type system and automatic casting/comparing is a nightmare.

Although there are namespaces now, the idea of everything being in the global scope was insane (and still even with namespaces, much is still in the global scope).

mysql_real_escape_string

There are no type-safe comparisons for greater or less then (You have ===, but no <== or >==).

This article: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

This subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/lolphp

The number of bugs that are closed as not-a-bug/wontfix.

I'm not sure how much of this has been fixed, but I've moved on to different languages and career choices and don't really want to look back that way.

> it's a very simple system to install & update, uses all the same LAMP stack everyone is used to

I think that has not been true for a while now. Maybe it's just the world i live in, but putting a bunch of files into a directory on a vanilla LAMP configuration as a deployment scenario is not something i encounter a lot nowadays.

edit: specifically referring to the "everyone is used to" part.

> its PHP based, written to a very high standard through & through

I read small parts of the source code and it doesn't adhere to any of the modern standards set by the PHP community.

Cons:

- The UI is lacking, esp. when viewing large diffs, compared to GitHub, VSTS-git, etc.

- `arc` CLI is awful

Batch editing a hundred tasks pops up a progress bar where you can watch it happen. I'm no MySQL fan but InnoDB shouldn't be that slow.

Can confirm, Phabricator is awesome!

GNOME turned down Phabricator in favour of GitLab partially because it is not easy to upgrade.

My own company is moving to GitLab - attempts to upgrade Phabricator have failed:

`git pull` is not a modern upgrade strategy - it ought to have an RPM.

Did you use a script like this one? https://gist.github.com/JosephKu/7a151e737c0a2de3eb3a6ec3c26... that is mostly what I do. Works flawlessly for me every time.

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