Phabricator

» see phabricator.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Evan Priestley wrote the first version inside Facebook around 2010, because reviewing code there needed a better tool than what existed and he built one. Everything in it got a name with a ph in it. Differential was the code review application, Diffusion browsed repositories, Maniphest tracked bugs, Herald watched for changes you wanted to know about, Phriction was the wiki, and Arcanist was the command line client that tied your terminal to all of it. The whole thing was PHP under the Apache 2.0 license and it spoke Git, Mercurial and Subversion.

He left Facebook in 2011 and started Phacility to keep working on it full time. Outside Facebook it became the tracker of choice for large open source projects that wanted their own bug database rather than a rented one. Wikimedia moved onto it in 2014, and installs went up at LLVM, KDE, FreeBSD, Blender, Quora and GnuPG. Dropbox, Discord, Pinterest and Uber ran it internally. For a certain slice of the 2010s, if you filed a serious bug against serious open source software, the form you filed it on was Maniphest.

On 29 May 2021 Priestley posted a note titled Phacility is Winding Down Operations. Effective 1 June, Phabricator was no longer actively maintained. Phacility would nominally keep the lights on but there would be no regular updates and no way to ask for a feature, and every customer was told plainly to migrate to something else.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

What people actually loved was Differential, and specifically the shape of the workflow around it. You typed arc diff in a terminal, a revision appeared with your change on it, reviewers got assigned, and the review ended with a button that said Accept Revision or Request Changes. Revisions were units of change rather than branches of commits, which meant you could stack work on top of unreviewed work and keep the history clean afterward. GitHub took years to grow anything comparable, and engineers who used both still write posts about missing this one.

Herald was the other piece people remember: standing rules that watched every commit and every revision going by and pinged you when one touched a file or a path you cared about. On a codebase with thousands of contributors that is the difference between owning a subsystem and hearing about it later. It is also the kind of feature that only gets built by somebody who felt the absence personally.

~ the unraveling ~

The problem was never the software. Phabricator was essentially one maintainer, and the hosted business at phacility.com was supposed to be what paid for him. It never got large enough to. Meanwhile GitHub became the default for anything new, free private repositories arrived in 2019, and the last practical reason for a small team to stand up a PHP monolith with a pile of daemons behind it went away. Self-hosting stopped being the normal choice and became the choice you had to justify.

Everywhere I have worked, the tool was whatever the default was, and by the mid-2010s the default meant GitHub, later GitLab. Phabricator was the thing you met from the outside: you needed to report something to a project that ran one, made an account you would use twice, and noticed that the review interface was better than the one you went back to.

~ the next chapter ~

Long-time contributors forked it with Priestley's blessing and under a new name. Phorge announced its stable public release on 7 September 2022 and is still maintained. That is the healthy ending available to open source and it worked here, which is more than most of the graves on this site got.

The stranger part is that the dead version is still in service. phabricator.wikimedia.org answers today and Wikimedia tasks still live on it, five years after upstream stopped. phabricator.org has no DNS at all. phacility.com loads, shows the old product pitch, and puts one line above it: effective June 1, 2021, Phabricator is no longer actively maintained. The copyright notice at the bottom of that page still reads 2011.

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