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Comment by Rafert | Hacker News Reader

What experiences do people have with http://phabricator.org/ ? It's not a GitHub clone but it does seem very complete, possibly replacing Jira and Stash if you're into the Atlassian ecosystem.

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I've been working on migrating to using phabricator at my company. The developer workflow is a bit different than that of GitHub/GitLab but it's nothing that should hinder development. Primarily it revolves around using a client-side command/utility called 'arcanist' in order to submit code for reviews. The largest difficulty is working with feature branches which is a newer concept at my company.

I have it working with LDAP + ssh access (a la GitHub, everyone uses the 'git' account to push but uses their own keypair for authentication). The review system works quite well, and one thing that I hadn't seen in other systems is the ability to "squash" revisions -> while the code is being reviewed and updated, once it's finally 'landed' into the repository all the diffs can be squished to a single commit rather than having multiple commits correcting eachother. One of the nicer things about running Phabricator is that it has quite a bit of documentation, and

I've been quite pleased with Phabricator, and the bright people working on it are always helpful in the IRC.

The largest gripe I have with Phabricator is the UI is a little tedious at times (multiple page navigations for doing some things which feel like it could be simpler, etc.).

You can create yourself an account on their hosted version, and browse their development of Phabricator: https://secure.phabricator.com/

Edit: One other thing I wanted to point out which Phabricator does that GitHub/GitLab and others do not appear to - Phabricator starts to form a model around "Ownership" of code which has been useful on a large project. People can elect to be notified when areas of code change that they otherwise would not notice.

Thanks (to you and the others) for your replies. The code ownership thing is interesting, I saw something similar in Zach Holman's presentation on how GitHub works: http://zachholman.com/talk/move-fast-break-nothing/

I realized I left a dangling sentence:

One of the nicer things about running Phabricator is that it has quite a bit of documentation, and..

..and the install provides really great feedback about how it's running. Server issues are identified and displayed to logged-in administrators, so phabricator actively analyses its status and any reports what actions might need taken. The upgrade process is really smooth as well.

We switched to it 6 months ago and are loving it. We have about 20 developers interacting with it and recently people are starting to move more and more project management and analysis tasks in alongside the code stuff (engineering/modeling/design company).

Arcanist - command line tool, great! GUI - confusing, strange names on modules and lots of navigation issues. Tasks - works, but too clumsy Workboards - just too bare bone to be functional code review - one of the better ones

We use gitlab as a replacement for gitosis and in that workflow there is no longer any room for phabricator.

But now that phabricator can self host repos it is a big plus. They should rework the GUI, it is my biggest gripe at the moment.

What I miss in all tools I have tried is to make a random comment in the source tree. I don't want to fake a branch to achieve that.

Phabricator is a brilliant piece of software. Very well written code, an emphasis on security, nice UI, tons of features.

Once you get used to it, the Differential code review process feels very natural (better than pull requests, even).