6 ms·

Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

269 points by carwyn 5y ago

01100011 5y ago
Too bad. Phabricator was a great tool for handling various aspects of a software project(SCM integration, task tracking, messaging, code reviews, etc). I used it on a couple of projects and it seemed to work very well.
carwyn 5y ago
Slightly more here: https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/2021.22/ https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/2021.22/ Shame, the code review was good and one of the few that supported task dependencies :(
smitty1e 5y ago
"Phabricator is a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application."
- dmitriid 5y ago
  So?
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    So this post has absolutely zero context.
    - smitty1e 5y ago
      Try to give it some, get mod bombed. So it goes.
      - lima 5y ago
        You got downvoted the boring way.
        smitty1e 5y ago
        Ya gotta laugh at this stuff.
      - iamcreasy 5y ago
        I think what this application does add more context than its tech stack.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        being LAMP stack doesn't make software bad or otherwise more likely to fail commercially. The whole web (excluding some older perl/cgi-bin stuff) was built on it before Rails became popular.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        I don't see anything in that comment about good or bad. I do see at least some information about what Phabricator is.
        eitland 5y ago
        Point is the description is about as useful as describing a car as an cage with an engine and wheels. Yes it is correct. But it can be anything: - a car - a truck - a trailer with a power generator Phabricator was a (very) different take on the same class of tooling as GitLab: source code management, task management, code reviews etc integrated.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        And if I ask "What the heck is a camry?", then that vague description is much better than nothing. > Phabricator was a (very) different take on the same class of tooling as GitLab: source code management, task management, code reviews etc integrated. Great. If you made that comment 11 hours ago then maybe some downvotes on smitty1e would have been justified. Instead it's "how dare you improve the situation somewhat!".
        dmitriid 5y ago
        > that vague description is much better than nothing. It's not "better than nothing". It, itself, is nothing at best.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        Pretend the initial comment didn't say LAMP but just said "web app". That's clearly not useless, right? You can tell from context that it must be software, but "web app" is an obvious improvement from there. You could argue that "LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application" instead of "web app" adds nothing more than "web app", and I won't fight you on that. But surely it's still at least as good as "web app"! Also "that vague description" was referring to "cage with an engine and wheels". It's crazy to say that's a useless description, when the starting point is "anything in the world".
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        Your "context" was about as useful as noting that this post went out on a day of the week. Or that there's weather outside.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Not familiar with it, but their installation guide is one of the best I've ever seen.
saurik 5y ago
Phabricator had seemed to be the only good product in this space when I had looked; what are people even using instead? (I guess they just put up with GitHub :/.)
- axk 5y ago
  Gerrit is solid: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/ https://www.gerritcodereview.com/
  - Jonanin 5y ago
    The UI is atrocious, unfortunately.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - lima 5y ago
      Check again - it got a serious makeover recently. It's still far from intutive, but so much better than it used to be. It's a power user tool that has a slight learning curve.
    - zdw 5y ago
      Gerrit is a code review tool first, with code browsing not being a core focus. GitHub and others are frequently code browsing tools first, with code review coming second. "Code hosting has look like GitHub" is unfortunately a common myopia. Phabricator (from the little I used it) seems closer to Gerrit than other code hosting.
  - lima 5y ago
    Ack! Recently moved from Phabricator to Gerrit and deleting Arcanist was a plus.
  - JoshTriplett 5y ago
    Does it still desperately want you to squash all your patches, or does it do a good job of handling an ordered stack of patches these days?
codeapprove 5y ago
That's a shame, heard only good things about those tools. Shameless but timely plug: I'm building a much better code review tool for teams on GitHub. Check out https://codeapprove.com https://codeapprove.com and if you're interested to hear more just email me (sam at habosa dot com).
- lima 5y ago
  Reviewable is another similar review improvement tool for GitHub: https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io ...or just use Gerrit[1], which can do everything these do out of the box, and has a much nicer workflow than GitHub once you got over the learning curve. [1]: https://www.gerritcodereview.com https://www.gerritcodereview.com
  - Macha 5y ago
    I've never actually used Gerrit personally, but I've twice been on teams that had recently dropped Gerrit at the time I joined (once for Bitbucket/Stash, once for Github Enterprise), and neither seemed to ever look back.
ZuLuuuuuu 5y ago
Is there a summary of why this product is not maintained anymore? From time to time I would hear about Phabricator, but I didn't know that the project was in trouble.
- woleium 5y ago
  I'd guess it's not profitable for them?
- kemayo 5y ago
  Maybe Evan just got sick of it, or decided to get a different job which wouldn't allow a side-project like that. Hazards of a single-person company. That said, as a single-person company, the listed support costs [1] were probably sufficient to pay him a reasonable salary assuming there were any paying hosting/support customers at all. (Which is why I jumped to "he wants to do something else" rather than "it's not making enough to survive".) [1]: https://admin.phacility.com/book/phacility/article/support_pacts/ https://admin.phacility.com/book/phacility/article/support_p...
abbe98 5y ago
I always had a good experience with Phabricator, especially its customization/dashboards. Wikimedia still uses it[1]. [1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/
- ipsum2 5y ago
  It's a shame that Wikimedia couldn't donate money to Phabricator for it to stay alive, considering it raised ~$30mil in 2019.
  - MatmaRex 5y ago
    Wikimedia Foundation has sponsored Phabricator development, e.g. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/9/sponsored_phabricator_improvements/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/9/sponsore... My impression is that the developers (or perhaps the remaining single developer, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) has lost interest in maintaining it, rather than been unable to continue.
  - 20after4 5y ago
    Wikimedia has been maintaining a phabricator fork for years and have sponsored upstream with monetary contributions on more than one occasion. It doesn’t seem like there is much interest in finding ways to keep phacility alive. Note: I work on phabricator at Wikimedia. My opinions do not necessarily match those of the foundation and I’m speaking from personal experience not from any position of authority.
    - Shastick 5y ago
      Do you already know whether wikimedia will continue to maintain its fork, or plan to move away?
      - 20after4 5y ago
        No decision has been made. I'm attempting to make a case for maintaining it.
nine_k 5y ago
To clarify: this applies not just to phabricator-dot-com, but Phabricator the software: https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/commit/9ceb66453501d461800617b9fb2d4af4ba2c9514 https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/commit/9ceb66453501... This is unexpected. Many companies, among them as well-resourced as Facebook, use Phabricator. I wonder if it will be forked soon by some party interested in keeping it around. OTOH it looks like none such party exists, because the public sources have not been updated literally for years. Maybe everyone interested just runs their private fork :( Phabricator should be reasonably easy to self-host anyway.
- rachelbythebay 5y ago
  FB's phabricator went its own way long ago. I imagine this has exactly zero impact on their day to day. Put it this way: the last time I saw it, they still had the "clowncopterize" button. Try finding that anywhere else.
  - sprayk 5y ago
    I heard this was still in the non-fb version if you uncheck "super serious business mode" in the settings somewhere
  - unixhero 5y ago
    That sounds fun! What did it do?
    - aseipp 5y ago
      It was the reviewers "Approve" button for a submitted patch. The options are/were (approximately) "Reject", or "Clowncopterize"
  - Nemo_bis 5y ago
    Do you mean Facebook is running a fork of Phabricator, or what?
    - 5y ago
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Man, in my opinion, in software, things don't really get started until after surviving for about 10 years or so. Everything else is fleeting. Quite nice to see it saw 11 years, though.
kludgeoldfart 5y ago
Phuck
evilelectron 5y ago
Sad news indeed :(
ferdowsi 5y ago
Whoa. Really, really disappointed about this. The Phabricator approach to reviews and merges was incredibly impactful on a previous team. It encouraged discipline and an informative main branch that was always linked to reviews, and free of commits like "fixing lint errors" and "actually fix lint errors, for real". https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabflavor/article/recommendations_on_revision_control/ https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabflavor/article/recom... The task management system isn't bad either, considering how weak Github's is and how bloated JIRA is.
- turadg 5y ago
  +1 to “one idea is one commit” philosophy (and article) If you’re using GitHub try “Allow squash merging” https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/configuring-pull-request-merges/configuring-commit-squashing-for-pull-requests https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository...
Aeolun 5y ago
This post about shuttering operations is quite devoid of reasons. I can’t imagine customers would be happy about that.
- morpheuskafka 5y ago
  I mean, if you're whole company is shutting down (as opposed to being sold and carrying its goodwill with it), it doesn't really matter what your customers thing anymore--you won't be around for them to think badly of.
  - Nemo_bis 5y ago
    Well, it's possible to donate or transfer assets as part of a liquidation.
geuis 5y ago
Phabricator is used at some very large companies like Pinterest. It’s easily the best general purpose tools of its kind I’ve used. I won’t be surprised if management gets picked up by someone soon.
bogota 5y ago
I got to meet evan once when i was in SF and he was awesome to hang out with im curious what he is going to be up to next. Phabricator was one of a few pieces of software that actually brought me joy when using. I will always miss the diff review process now that my current company is moving from phabricator to github and i’ll be unlikely to ever use it at a company again with this update. Thanks Evan for all the work you have put in over the years. Some of my biggest learnings as an engineer have been from reading and interacting with you on the phabricator secure server and reading your code when extending phab for companies.
thrower123 5y ago
I've always enjoyed the Phabricator landing page, because it looks like a joke. > Pre-Commit Code Review > Review others' code with Differential, because they can't be trusted. > Shows code so you can look at it. > Leave helpful comments and anecdotes. > Challenge the intern's test plan. > Gently place bad code back in the author's queue.
- ianhawes 5y ago
  My personal favorite: > Written in PHP so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program.
  - quicklime 5y ago
    My favorite was: > Facebook engineers rave about Phabricator, describing it with glowing terms like “okay” and “mandatory”
- Redoubts 5y ago
  Feature reports were cute too: https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/777/quick_look_suggesting_edits_with_inline_comments/ https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/777/quick_loo... > Starting in 2020 Week 20 (Late May), you can suggest an edit when leaving an inline comment in Differential. This feature makes it much easier to get syntax errors and untested code into production quickly.
justinzollars 5y ago
I'm pretty sad about this. I hate Jira. Phabricator was pretty nice.
jcrben 5y ago
Seems like there might be a business opportunity here
quadrifoliate 5y ago
Phabricator-the-software is a really good tool for code reviews and lightweight task management. It's used at my current workplace (self-hosted) for both. We aren't big enough to effectively take over maintenance – but I hope someone does. It would be a shame for it to be replaced by 10 other tools that reimplement the same features poorly.
- 20after4 5y ago
  There seems to be a bit of momentum building for a community supported fork. Feel free to join #phabricator on libera.chat irc if you'd like to follow along.
aseipp 5y ago
Really sad. Phabricator is excellent and IMO unmatched by other tools, even today, and Evan's sharp eye for design decisions was really inspiring to me. 10 years is a good ride, though. Evan, if you're reading this and I'm ever in San Francisco soon, I'll have to buy you lunch!
wilsonthewhale 5y ago
As others have mentioned, this is a shame. I found the Phabricator review model much more flexible and easy to work with than GitHub and Github-clone workflows. It's basically the traditional ultra-scalable mailing-list + patches workflow, but with very nice tooling and UI on top. I'm going to miss it when I leave FB some day.
- wilsonthewhale 5y ago
  as an addon, I'd love to see more organizations try to tackle this problem without just lifting the flawed GitHub model.
  - beagle3 5y ago
    I have no experience with phabricator but it sounds like sourcehut - are you familiar with that one?
    - sirn 5y ago
      It's similar, but Phabricator patches are submitted via API to Differential instead of to a mailing list. Phabricator provides Arcanist (arc) to interact with its API from command-line, but some projects has their own tooling around it (e.g. Mozilla uses moz-phab as a wrapper around Arcanist). Though I think the main selling point of Phabricator is its issue tracker (Maniphest). It is very, very, very nice. May be even the best in class. The company I'm working for switched to JIRA and we still miss Phabricator's.
franciscop 5y ago
Contrary to the other comments in this thread, I've had a bad experience with Phabricator. With other solutions like Github, you can commit or create a PR straight on the website easily. This makes things like fixing typos in the README a joy, where everyone technical or not can participate. Github is also well known and has issues, PRs and a CI all integrated into one, while with Phabricator each of these are either a self-host Jenkins (again, friction) or in a totally different/confusing location. It's sad to see a tech company that many liked go, but hopefully this means the higher ups will reconsider Phab usage in my company :)
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I have had a similar bad time using Phabricator, but I think it was because of the procedures implemented by our customer and me expecting it to work more like Stash/Bitbucket. Phabricator seems like it was the right choice for many large project, and I’m sad to see it go on their behalf. It won’t sadden me to never having to use it again though.
fooker 5y ago
Doesn't GPL seem more palatable now? All the big companies have their own private fork resulting in zero contributions to the main project.
- mkl 5y ago
  GPL wouldn't prevent that. If a big company is running their own fork of GPL software on a server they control there's no obligation to provide the code to anyone else. Maybe you're thinking of AGPL? That seems as likely to lead to no adoption as adoption with code contributions.
twalla 5y ago
It's interesting to see so many people with positive experiences with Phabricator - I work somewhere with a Phab install and onboarding new employees who've only ever used github/gitlab and branching workflows incurs a _significant_ cost. That, coupled with conduit being frustrating to develop against and lots of nice open source tooling basically being unusable without heavy modification due to assuming you're using a branching workflow has soured me on Phab. I'm hoping this can be used as additional justification to push us towards ... well... anything else. That being said, Herald is awesome and compared to basically any "modern" replacement, the UI is actually snappy and things don't get moved every 6 months for no goddamn reason (thanks Atlassian)
kaendfinger 5y ago
I contributed to Phabricator a few times, and Evan was a pleasure to work with. I'm sorry to see it go but I hope for the best for Evan. I really hope this is a goodbye on to something great. Phabricator will hold a great place in my heart as software written by a developer for developers that is well thought out, dog-fooded to the max, and fun. My hope is that it can be well stewarded by a company into continuity. I wish I had the time to do so. In short, thank you Evan and all those in the community for many years of wonderful software development.
kuba-orlik 5y ago
What I really like about Phabricator as a review tool: * keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the changes * ability to add a comment to multiple lines of code * ability to suggest changes inline * comments are saved as I type them, so an accidental tab close saves my work * comments are submitted in batches when I choose to, not one-by-one after saving each one. Its's sooo useful, because it often happens that I ask a question about some piece of code and upon further reading I find the answer, so I can delete the question before submitting all the comments and the author won't be bothered by it If anyone knows of a feview tool with similiar set of features, please please let me know :) When it comes to task management in Phab, I like how the tasks can be arranged in a dependency tree. We have our "todo" view set up so it only shows tasks without dependencies and sorted by prioroty, so the work on the project self-organizes
- beermonster 5y ago
  I have to say I’m not all that into GH[1]. However, if the above is what you want from a review tool I think it meets most, if not all, of those requirements. [1]I mainly am not a fan of the PR model, GH’s performance if often terrible, availability like a yo-yo, and the UI is not as good as it could be. I’m also not a fan of centralising a distributed tool with a load of vendor lock-in to boot. There are some odd things you can’t turn off (such as PRs) and the issue management is weak, so you have to use something over the top of it for project management such as ZenHub. SourceHut is more up my street.
  - kuba-orlik 5y ago
    Yeah, I didn't mention self-hostability is a must. SourceHut is terryfying to junior members
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vickychijwani 5y ago
  I think Gerrit does most/all of this, like kb shortcuts, saving drafts and posting comments in a batch.
ofrzeta 5y ago
We've been using Phabricator for several years and just recently started to use Gitlab in parallel. One of the main reasons was Phabricator's confusing and esoteric use of "spaces" for access control that made it hard to include external developers on projects. On the other hand the Phabricator GUI is much less confusing than Gitlab.
- 20after4 5y ago
  There are other ways besides spaces to control access in a fine grained way by using projects as access control lists and policies on the areas you want to restrict.
20after4 5y ago
Phabricator has been a huge part of my career. Having spent the past 11ish years maintaining phabricator installs this really hit me hard. Fwiw phabricator is very stable and maintainable code. I would be happy to work with anyone who is interested in collaborating on a community maintained fork.
- jsiepkes 5y ago
  First OTRS goes closed source and now Phabricator decides to call it quits. The Wikimedia foundation seems to be a bit on a bad luck streak regarding some of the OSS projects it uses. Would be really cool to see a Phabricator fork though. Especially the issue managment is unmatched in my opinion. Having a single pool of issues works way better then having issues per repo if your working in an organization.
- thaumaturgy 5y ago
  I hope that such a thing happens, it's too big and useful of a project to die like this.
- bogota 5y ago
  Without Evan im curious how the project will carry on. He really knew every part of that codebase and all the edge cases. Time and time in the forums I would propose seemingly good ideas but be shown very quickly and kindly by Evan why doing so was going to increase tech debt and wasn’t the best way forward for the project. Not to say it cant be done but losing Evan on the project is just such a huge loss.
  - 20after4 5y ago
    Totally agree with you, it's not the same without Evan.
user5994461 5y ago
I find the announcement confusing. Is the company shutting down? Existing instances will continue running "indefinitely". How can a company be shutdown and promise to run forever at the same time? How does this affect phabricator on premise and phabricator online? The 1st of June is tomorrow, today is a week end. This is a zero day notice for users, including paying users. Hope you weren't planning to start a new project on Monday. Ouch.
- kqr 5y ago
  Indefinitely does not mean forever, it just means without a specified end date.
shaneos 5y ago
For you fans of Phabricator macros, you can still get your meme hit on GitHub using https://gitme.me https://gitme.me !
IshKebab 5y ago
I wonder if this will be good for Phabricator. The commercialisation / support model made it basically impossible to contribute code to (or at least enough of a pain that only the most determined people would bother). If a community fork emerges we might see more contributions.
tychota 5y ago
I've mixed filling. I'm sad, because: - I started using Phabricator in 2012 and tried some contribution back then, when I was still learning. I learn PHP working on contribution. - The product is really awesome and back then, the difference with GH and others was even more striking. Draft PRs years before GH, proper issue management with work board years before GH, a lot of automation (Herald) and an yet unmatched ability to customize the interface, and build extensions to the program. In peculiar, behind able to define custom lint and unit test and have them integrated to the UI is awesome. I've seen others good ideas come before its time, in peculiar with integrated CI/CD, being able to see links between everything (issues, diffs, wikis, ect) - The codebase is awesome. I mean, they build a fully modular system from nothing, just raw PHP. In my sense, they build one of the best PHP framework along the product. The architecture is nice, and they had really great ideas (overheating queries https://secure.phabricator.com/T13133 https://secure.phabricator.com/T13133, EditEngine/ApplicationEditor: https://secure.phabricator.com/T9132 https://secure.phabricator.com/T9132). Bob, Chad, and Evan are awesome devs. They helped me improve and shaped me as a developers. They also created a fondation of craftmanship with stances like: "Don't create to much config, it is a sign of badly designed product" and so on - I learned a lot about infra deploying phabricator. - They was a lot of humor back then: https://secure.phabricator.com/T10000 https://secure.phabricator.com/T10000, https://secure.phabricator.com/T10054#151066 https://secure.phabricator.com/T10054#151066, https://secure.phabricator.com/T6389 https://secure.phabricator.com/T6389 For all this, thanks Evan, and others. It was a nice adventure. I will really miss this... ... but for me that was expected, the contributions shrinked, the core team went from 3 to 1. External contribution was also more and more difficult and while I understand the reason (reviewing and maintaining is more expensive than doing all yourself), it build a model that only depend on the willingness of one man. Also lack of proper integration with Gitlab/Github (Nuance https://secure.phabricator.com/T12739 https://secure.phabricator.com/T12739), sticking to an old, pre React area JS framework called Javelin did make the end inevitable. I did see the contribution decrease overtime(see https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/graphs/contributors https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/graphs/contributors). In the last years, Phabricator was just a ghost to me, sadly... I hopes that Evan is well, and the end of adventure is not to bitter. I think too much depends on Phabricator for it too end like that, and I'm looking forward to @20after4 or others to fork. Maybe it will have a second breath. Anyway, so long and thanks for the fish !
thiht 5y ago
I had to use Phabricator a few years ago and I hated it. It's way too hard to use for honestly not a lot of gain. Reviewing code was not enjoyable. I like the simpler approach offered by Bitbucket/GitHub/Gitlab. Reviewing is easy and painless.
bubble0h7 5y ago
Well this is sad news to start the week with. I'd be interested in contributing to a community fork if one emerges. I don't want to see this project die. Thank you to everyone who has worked on it over the years!

269 points by carwyn 5y ago

Too bad. Phabricator was a great tool for handling various aspects of a software project(SCM integration, task tracking, messaging, code reviews, etc). I used it on a couple of projects and it seemed to work very well.

carwyn 5y ago

Slightly more here: https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/2021.22/ https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/2021.22/ Shame, the code review was good and one of the few that supported task dependencies :(

smitty1e 5y ago

"Phabricator is a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application."

dmitriid 5y ago
So?
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  So this post has absolutely zero context.
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    Try to give it some, get mod bombed. So it goes.
    - lima 5y ago
      You got downvoted the boring way.
      - smitty1e 5y ago
        Ya gotta laugh at this stuff.
    - iamcreasy 5y ago
      I think what this application does add more context than its tech stack.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      being LAMP stack doesn't make software bad or otherwise more likely to fail commercially. The whole web (excluding some older perl/cgi-bin stuff) was built on it before Rails became popular.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        I don't see anything in that comment about good or bad. I do see at least some information about what Phabricator is.
        eitland 5y ago
        Point is the description is about as useful as describing a car as an cage with an engine and wheels. Yes it is correct. But it can be anything: - a car - a truck - a trailer with a power generator Phabricator was a (very) different take on the same class of tooling as GitLab: source code management, task management, code reviews etc integrated.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        And if I ask "What the heck is a camry?", then that vague description is much better than nothing. > Phabricator was a (very) different take on the same class of tooling as GitLab: source code management, task management, code reviews etc integrated. Great. If you made that comment 11 hours ago then maybe some downvotes on smitty1e would have been justified. Instead it's "how dare you improve the situation somewhat!".
        dmitriid 5y ago
        > that vague description is much better than nothing. It's not "better than nothing". It, itself, is nothing at best.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        Pretend the initial comment didn't say LAMP but just said "web app". That's clearly not useless, right? You can tell from context that it must be software, but "web app" is an obvious improvement from there. You could argue that "LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application" instead of "web app" adds nothing more than "web app", and I won't fight you on that. But surely it's still at least as good as "web app"! Also "that vague description" was referring to "cage with an engine and wheels". It's crazy to say that's a useless description, when the starting point is "anything in the world".
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      Your "context" was about as useful as noting that this post went out on a day of the week. Or that there's weather outside.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Not familiar with it, but their installation guide is one of the best I've ever seen.

saurik 5y ago

Phabricator had seemed to be the only good product in this space when I had looked; what are people even using instead? (I guess they just put up with GitHub :/.)

axk 5y ago
Gerrit is solid: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/ https://www.gerritcodereview.com/
- Jonanin 5y ago
  The UI is atrocious, unfortunately.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lima 5y ago
    Check again - it got a serious makeover recently. It's still far from intutive, but so much better than it used to be. It's a power user tool that has a slight learning curve.
  - zdw 5y ago
    Gerrit is a code review tool first, with code browsing not being a core focus. GitHub and others are frequently code browsing tools first, with code review coming second. "Code hosting has look like GitHub" is unfortunately a common myopia. Phabricator (from the little I used it) seems closer to Gerrit than other code hosting.
- lima 5y ago
  Ack! Recently moved from Phabricator to Gerrit and deleting Arcanist was a plus.
- JoshTriplett 5y ago
  Does it still desperately want you to squash all your patches, or does it do a good job of handling an ordered stack of patches these days?

codeapprove 5y ago

That's a shame, heard only good things about those tools. Shameless but timely plug: I'm building a much better code review tool for teams on GitHub. Check out https://codeapprove.com https://codeapprove.com and if you're interested to hear more just email me (sam at habosa dot com).

lima 5y ago
Reviewable is another similar review improvement tool for GitHub: https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io ...or just use Gerrit[1], which can do everything these do out of the box, and has a much nicer workflow than GitHub once you got over the learning curve. [1]: https://www.gerritcodereview.com https://www.gerritcodereview.com
- Macha 5y ago
  I've never actually used Gerrit personally, but I've twice been on teams that had recently dropped Gerrit at the time I joined (once for Bitbucket/Stash, once for Github Enterprise), and neither seemed to ever look back.

ZuLuuuuuu 5y ago

Is there a summary of why this product is not maintained anymore? From time to time I would hear about Phabricator, but I didn't know that the project was in trouble.

woleium 5y ago
I'd guess it's not profitable for them?
kemayo 5y ago
Maybe Evan just got sick of it, or decided to get a different job which wouldn't allow a side-project like that. Hazards of a single-person company. That said, as a single-person company, the listed support costs [1] were probably sufficient to pay him a reasonable salary assuming there were any paying hosting/support customers at all. (Which is why I jumped to "he wants to do something else" rather than "it's not making enough to survive".) [1]: https://admin.phacility.com/book/phacility/article/support_pacts/ https://admin.phacility.com/book/phacility/article/support_p...

abbe98 5y ago

I always had a good experience with Phabricator, especially its customization/dashboards. Wikimedia still uses it[1]. [1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/

ipsum2 5y ago
It's a shame that Wikimedia couldn't donate money to Phabricator for it to stay alive, considering it raised ~$30mil in 2019.
- MatmaRex 5y ago
  Wikimedia Foundation has sponsored Phabricator development, e.g. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/9/sponsored_phabricator_improvements/ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/9/sponsore... My impression is that the developers (or perhaps the remaining single developer, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) has lost interest in maintaining it, rather than been unable to continue.
- 20after4 5y ago
  Wikimedia has been maintaining a phabricator fork for years and have sponsored upstream with monetary contributions on more than one occasion. It doesn’t seem like there is much interest in finding ways to keep phacility alive. Note: I work on phabricator at Wikimedia. My opinions do not necessarily match those of the foundation and I’m speaking from personal experience not from any position of authority.
  - Shastick 5y ago
    Do you already know whether wikimedia will continue to maintain its fork, or plan to move away?
    - 20after4 5y ago
      No decision has been made. I'm attempting to make a case for maintaining it.

nine_k 5y ago

To clarify: this applies not just to phabricator-dot-com, but Phabricator the software: https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/commit/9ceb66453501d461800617b9fb2d4af4ba2c9514 https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/commit/9ceb66453501... This is unexpected. Many companies, among them as well-resourced as Facebook, use Phabricator. I wonder if it will be forked soon by some party interested in keeping it around. OTOH it looks like none such party exists, because the public sources have not been updated literally for years. Maybe everyone interested just runs their private fork :( Phabricator should be reasonably easy to self-host anyway.

rachelbythebay 5y ago
FB's phabricator went its own way long ago. I imagine this has exactly zero impact on their day to day. Put it this way: the last time I saw it, they still had the "clowncopterize" button. Try finding that anywhere else.
- sprayk 5y ago
  I heard this was still in the non-fb version if you uncheck "super serious business mode" in the settings somewhere
- unixhero 5y ago
  That sounds fun! What did it do?
  - aseipp 5y ago
    It was the reviewers "Approve" button for a submitted patch. The options are/were (approximately) "Reject", or "Clowncopterize"
- Nemo_bis 5y ago
  Do you mean Facebook is running a fork of Phabricator, or what?
  - 5y ago

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

Man, in my opinion, in software, things don't really get started until after surviving for about 10 years or so. Everything else is fleeting. Quite nice to see it saw 11 years, though.

kludgeoldfart 5y ago

Phuck

evilelectron 5y ago

Sad news indeed :(

ferdowsi 5y ago

Whoa. Really, really disappointed about this. The Phabricator approach to reviews and merges was incredibly impactful on a previous team. It encouraged discipline and an informative main branch that was always linked to reviews, and free of commits like "fixing lint errors" and "actually fix lint errors, for real". https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabflavor/article/recommendations_on_revision_control/ https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabflavor/article/recom... The task management system isn't bad either, considering how weak Github's is and how bloated JIRA is.

turadg 5y ago
+1 to “one idea is one commit” philosophy (and article) If you’re using GitHub try “Allow squash merging” https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/configuring-pull-request-merges/configuring-commit-squashing-for-pull-requests https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository...

Aeolun 5y ago

This post about shuttering operations is quite devoid of reasons. I can’t imagine customers would be happy about that.

morpheuskafka 5y ago
I mean, if you're whole company is shutting down (as opposed to being sold and carrying its goodwill with it), it doesn't really matter what your customers thing anymore--you won't be around for them to think badly of.
- Nemo_bis 5y ago
  Well, it's possible to donate or transfer assets as part of a liquidation.

geuis 5y ago

Phabricator is used at some very large companies like Pinterest. It’s easily the best general purpose tools of its kind I’ve used. I won’t be surprised if management gets picked up by someone soon.

bogota 5y ago

I got to meet evan once when i was in SF and he was awesome to hang out with im curious what he is going to be up to next. Phabricator was one of a few pieces of software that actually brought me joy when using. I will always miss the diff review process now that my current company is moving from phabricator to github and i’ll be unlikely to ever use it at a company again with this update. Thanks Evan for all the work you have put in over the years. Some of my biggest learnings as an engineer have been from reading and interacting with you on the phabricator secure server and reading your code when extending phab for companies.

thrower123 5y ago

I've always enjoyed the Phabricator landing page, because it looks like a joke. > Pre-Commit Code Review > Review others' code with Differential, because they can't be trusted. > Shows code so you can look at it. > Leave helpful comments and anecdotes. > Challenge the intern's test plan. > Gently place bad code back in the author's queue.

ianhawes 5y ago
My personal favorite: > Written in PHP so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program.
- quicklime 5y ago
  My favorite was: > Facebook engineers rave about Phabricator, describing it with glowing terms like “okay” and “mandatory”
Redoubts 5y ago
Feature reports were cute too: https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/777/quick_look_suggesting_edits_with_inline_comments/ https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/777/quick_loo... > Starting in 2020 Week 20 (Late May), you can suggest an edit when leaving an inline comment in Differential. This feature makes it much easier to get syntax errors and untested code into production quickly.

justinzollars 5y ago

I'm pretty sad about this. I hate Jira. Phabricator was pretty nice.

jcrben 5y ago

Seems like there might be a business opportunity here

quadrifoliate 5y ago

Phabricator-the-software is a really good tool for code reviews and lightweight task management. It's used at my current workplace (self-hosted) for both. We aren't big enough to effectively take over maintenance – but I hope someone does. It would be a shame for it to be replaced by 10 other tools that reimplement the same features poorly.

20after4 5y ago
There seems to be a bit of momentum building for a community supported fork. Feel free to join #phabricator on libera.chat irc if you'd like to follow along.

aseipp 5y ago

Really sad. Phabricator is excellent and IMO unmatched by other tools, even today, and Evan's sharp eye for design decisions was really inspiring to me. 10 years is a good ride, though. Evan, if you're reading this and I'm ever in San Francisco soon, I'll have to buy you lunch!

wilsonthewhale 5y ago

As others have mentioned, this is a shame. I found the Phabricator review model much more flexible and easy to work with than GitHub and Github-clone workflows. It's basically the traditional ultra-scalable mailing-list + patches workflow, but with very nice tooling and UI on top. I'm going to miss it when I leave FB some day.

wilsonthewhale 5y ago
as an addon, I'd love to see more organizations try to tackle this problem without just lifting the flawed GitHub model.
- beagle3 5y ago
  I have no experience with phabricator but it sounds like sourcehut - are you familiar with that one?
  - sirn 5y ago
    It's similar, but Phabricator patches are submitted via API to Differential instead of to a mailing list. Phabricator provides Arcanist (arc) to interact with its API from command-line, but some projects has their own tooling around it (e.g. Mozilla uses moz-phab as a wrapper around Arcanist). Though I think the main selling point of Phabricator is its issue tracker (Maniphest). It is very, very, very nice. May be even the best in class. The company I'm working for switched to JIRA and we still miss Phabricator's.

franciscop 5y ago

Contrary to the other comments in this thread, I've had a bad experience with Phabricator. With other solutions like Github, you can commit or create a PR straight on the website easily. This makes things like fixing typos in the README a joy, where everyone technical or not can participate. Github is also well known and has issues, PRs and a CI all integrated into one, while with Phabricator each of these are either a self-host Jenkins (again, friction) or in a totally different/confusing location. It's sad to see a tech company that many liked go, but hopefully this means the higher ups will reconsider Phab usage in my company :)

mrweasel 5y ago
I have had a similar bad time using Phabricator, but I think it was because of the procedures implemented by our customer and me expecting it to work more like Stash/Bitbucket. Phabricator seems like it was the right choice for many large project, and I’m sad to see it go on their behalf. It won’t sadden me to never having to use it again though.

fooker 5y ago

Doesn't GPL seem more palatable now? All the big companies have their own private fork resulting in zero contributions to the main project.

mkl 5y ago
GPL wouldn't prevent that. If a big company is running their own fork of GPL software on a server they control there's no obligation to provide the code to anyone else. Maybe you're thinking of AGPL? That seems as likely to lead to no adoption as adoption with code contributions.

twalla 5y ago

It's interesting to see so many people with positive experiences with Phabricator - I work somewhere with a Phab install and onboarding new employees who've only ever used github/gitlab and branching workflows incurs a _significant_ cost. That, coupled with conduit being frustrating to develop against and lots of nice open source tooling basically being unusable without heavy modification due to assuming you're using a branching workflow has soured me on Phab. I'm hoping this can be used as additional justification to push us towards ... well... anything else. That being said, Herald is awesome and compared to basically any "modern" replacement, the UI is actually snappy and things don't get moved every 6 months for no goddamn reason (thanks Atlassian)

kaendfinger 5y ago

I contributed to Phabricator a few times, and Evan was a pleasure to work with. I'm sorry to see it go but I hope for the best for Evan. I really hope this is a goodbye on to something great. Phabricator will hold a great place in my heart as software written by a developer for developers that is well thought out, dog-fooded to the max, and fun. My hope is that it can be well stewarded by a company into continuity. I wish I had the time to do so. In short, thank you Evan and all those in the community for many years of wonderful software development.

kuba-orlik 5y ago

What I really like about Phabricator as a review tool: * keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the changes * ability to add a comment to multiple lines of code * ability to suggest changes inline * comments are saved as I type them, so an accidental tab close saves my work * comments are submitted in batches when I choose to, not one-by-one after saving each one. Its's sooo useful, because it often happens that I ask a question about some piece of code and upon further reading I find the answer, so I can delete the question before submitting all the comments and the author won't be bothered by it If anyone knows of a feview tool with similiar set of features, please please let me know :) When it comes to task management in Phab, I like how the tasks can be arranged in a dependency tree. We have our "todo" view set up so it only shows tasks without dependencies and sorted by prioroty, so the work on the project self-organizes

beermonster 5y ago
I have to say I’m not all that into GH[1]. However, if the above is what you want from a review tool I think it meets most, if not all, of those requirements. [1]I mainly am not a fan of the PR model, GH’s performance if often terrible, availability like a yo-yo, and the UI is not as good as it could be. I’m also not a fan of centralising a distributed tool with a load of vendor lock-in to boot. There are some odd things you can’t turn off (such as PRs) and the issue management is weak, so you have to use something over the top of it for project management such as ZenHub. SourceHut is more up my street.
- kuba-orlik 5y ago
  Yeah, I didn't mention self-hostability is a must. SourceHut is terryfying to junior members
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vickychijwani 5y ago
I think Gerrit does most/all of this, like kb shortcuts, saving drafts and posting comments in a batch.

ofrzeta 5y ago

We've been using Phabricator for several years and just recently started to use Gitlab in parallel. One of the main reasons was Phabricator's confusing and esoteric use of "spaces" for access control that made it hard to include external developers on projects. On the other hand the Phabricator GUI is much less confusing than Gitlab.

20after4 5y ago
There are other ways besides spaces to control access in a fine grained way by using projects as access control lists and policies on the areas you want to restrict.

20after4 5y ago

Phabricator has been a huge part of my career. Having spent the past 11ish years maintaining phabricator installs this really hit me hard. Fwiw phabricator is very stable and maintainable code. I would be happy to work with anyone who is interested in collaborating on a community maintained fork.

jsiepkes 5y ago
First OTRS goes closed source and now Phabricator decides to call it quits. The Wikimedia foundation seems to be a bit on a bad luck streak regarding some of the OSS projects it uses. Would be really cool to see a Phabricator fork though. Especially the issue managment is unmatched in my opinion. Having a single pool of issues works way better then having issues per repo if your working in an organization.
thaumaturgy 5y ago
I hope that such a thing happens, it's too big and useful of a project to die like this.
bogota 5y ago
Without Evan im curious how the project will carry on. He really knew every part of that codebase and all the edge cases. Time and time in the forums I would propose seemingly good ideas but be shown very quickly and kindly by Evan why doing so was going to increase tech debt and wasn’t the best way forward for the project. Not to say it cant be done but losing Evan on the project is just such a huge loss.
- 20after4 5y ago
  Totally agree with you, it's not the same without Evan.

user5994461 5y ago

I find the announcement confusing. Is the company shutting down? Existing instances will continue running "indefinitely". How can a company be shutdown and promise to run forever at the same time? How does this affect phabricator on premise and phabricator online? The 1st of June is tomorrow, today is a week end. This is a zero day notice for users, including paying users. Hope you weren't planning to start a new project on Monday. Ouch.

kqr 5y ago
Indefinitely does not mean forever, it just means without a specified end date.

shaneos 5y ago

For you fans of Phabricator macros, you can still get your meme hit on GitHub using https://gitme.me https://gitme.me !

IshKebab 5y ago

I wonder if this will be good for Phabricator. The commercialisation / support model made it basically impossible to contribute code to (or at least enough of a pain that only the most determined people would bother). If a community fork emerges we might see more contributions.

tychota 5y ago

I've mixed filling. I'm sad, because: - I started using Phabricator in 2012 and tried some contribution back then, when I was still learning. I learn PHP working on contribution. - The product is really awesome and back then, the difference with GH and others was even more striking. Draft PRs years before GH, proper issue management with work board years before GH, a lot of automation (Herald) and an yet unmatched ability to customize the interface, and build extensions to the program. In peculiar, behind able to define custom lint and unit test and have them integrated to the UI is awesome. I've seen others good ideas come before its time, in peculiar with integrated CI/CD, being able to see links between everything (issues, diffs, wikis, ect) - The codebase is awesome. I mean, they build a fully modular system from nothing, just raw PHP. In my sense, they build one of the best PHP framework along the product. The architecture is nice, and they had really great ideas (overheating queries https://secure.phabricator.com/T13133 https://secure.phabricator.com/T13133, EditEngine/ApplicationEditor: https://secure.phabricator.com/T9132 https://secure.phabricator.com/T9132). Bob, Chad, and Evan are awesome devs. They helped me improve and shaped me as a developers. They also created a fondation of craftmanship with stances like: "Don't create to much config, it is a sign of badly designed product" and so on - I learned a lot about infra deploying phabricator. - They was a lot of humor back then: https://secure.phabricator.com/T10000 https://secure.phabricator.com/T10000, https://secure.phabricator.com/T10054#151066 https://secure.phabricator.com/T10054#151066, https://secure.phabricator.com/T6389 https://secure.phabricator.com/T6389 For all this, thanks Evan, and others. It was a nice adventure. I will really miss this... ... but for me that was expected, the contributions shrinked, the core team went from 3 to 1. External contribution was also more and more difficult and while I understand the reason (reviewing and maintaining is more expensive than doing all yourself), it build a model that only depend on the willingness of one man. Also lack of proper integration with Gitlab/Github (Nuance https://secure.phabricator.com/T12739 https://secure.phabricator.com/T12739), sticking to an old, pre React area JS framework called Javelin did make the end inevitable. I did see the contribution decrease overtime(see https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/graphs/contributors https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/graphs/contributors). In the last years, Phabricator was just a ghost to me, sadly... I hopes that Evan is well, and the end of adventure is not to bitter. I think too much depends on Phabricator for it too end like that, and I'm looking forward to @20after4 or others to fork. Maybe it will have a second breath. Anyway, so long and thanks for the fish !

thiht 5y ago

I had to use Phabricator a few years ago and I hated it. It's way too hard to use for honestly not a lot of gain. Reviewing code was not enjoyable. I like the simpler approach offered by Bitbucket/GitHub/Gitlab. Reviewing is easy and painless.

bubble0h7 5y ago

Well this is sad news to start the week with. I'd be interested in contributing to a community fork if one emerges. I don't want to see this project die. Thank you to everyone who has worked on it over the years!