Phabricator

Phabricator is a solid agile project manager and issue tracker. It's customizable, here's how I use it.

WORKFLOW		Description
Workflow columns	Backlog => In Progress	There is a third column Fixed that can be shown, it's nice to move Resolved items there on occasion to clean up the board.
Create a task	Click dropdown on Backlog, select Create Task.	Or you can click the large + in the top-right toolbar, select Create Task, and assign the correct Project in the tags box.
Start a task	Drag it from Backlog to In Progress.	Drop above an existing task so the priority will be automatically set. If this is not possible, you need to manually change Priority to High so that the CI dashboard shows the task.
Finish a task	Change Status to Resolved.	This will hide the task on the CI dashboard. It will also immediately remove the task from the board if you are only showing Open statuses. You can also drag the task from In Progress to Fixed; this has no real effect on the task, but will keep your board better organized.

Tips

If you are viewing a board by priority, and drag, the dropped task will have its priority automatically adjusted to fit in drag zone. This works great if you can drag a new item from Backlog to a spot above an existing In Progress item. I changed the default task priority from "Needs Triage" (90) to "Normal" (50) to make my flow simpler. I don't need someone else to set the initial priority. Natural and By-priority sorting BOTH maintain their specific orders. Fucking weird. NEVER USE NATURAL. Ever. You have to set sort by priority and save as default for new boards. Wikipedia is done with Phabricator and is a great resource, for example their project management guidelines.

Maintenance

Install Installing Phabricator is as simple as any other LAMP installation. We grabbed the three primary git repos, here: m@bitpost cd development/phabricator git clone https://github.com/phacility/libphutil.git git clone https://github.com/phacility/arcanist.git git clone https://github.com/phacility/phabricator.git Then set up an alias and directory in apache. Then a mysql user + db. Browse to the url to finish. Easy peasy. Upgrade Stop phabricator (I usually ignore this step) # stop apache m@bitpost cd development/phabricator/phabricator bin/phd stop Update code m@bitpost cd development/phabricator/libphutil && git pull m@bitpost cd ../arcanist && git pull m@bitpost cd ../phabricator && git pull Upgrade the mysql schema m@bitpost cd development/phabricator/phabricator bin/storage upgrade Restart phabricator # restart apache m@bitpost cd development/phabricator/phabricator bin/phd start Change url WARNING! No matter what I did, I couldn't get arcanist (or curl) to accept a subdomain's (agile.bitpost.com) CA certs. Browsers were fine. Shrug. Using a full domain worked fine. Maybe I'll revisit some time, but for now it's too much pain, move on. Stop and reconfigure apache, restart NOTE: currently we are using a 5-domain cert that includes bitpost.com, agile., www., ssl., mail. Update phabricator config - this is different than and in addition to .arcconfig files! phabricator/ $ ./bin/config set phabricator.base-uri 'https://agile.bitpost.com/' Update ~/development/config/bitpost/home/m/development/phabricator/.arcconfig And make sure that the three phab folders (phabricator, arcanist, libphutil) point to it You MAY need to run through some of the API steps again, below

API

The Phabricator API can be used to extract a query of tasks. You need to get a (permanent) auth certificate from arcanist: m@bitpost cd development/phabricator/arcanist bin/arc set-config default https://abettersoftware.org/ emacs .arcconfig # and set phabricator.uri to the same emacs ../phabricator/.arcconfig # and set phabricator.uri to the same bin/arc install-certificate That will tell you to browse here. You'll get an "API Token" once you log in, eg cli-5sdfksomkhgvasdlfkwfelk or whatever (NOT that one). Paste API Token from that page: cli-5fxsvztkshgvtc7ssdf Writing ~/.arcrc... SUCCESS! API Token installed. It then creates ~/.arcrc with the token, which is used by subsequent arc calls, like this: Now you can use that in the API calls to authenticate, like this: curl https://abettersoftware.org/api/maniphest.query -d api.token=cli-5fxsvztksdfsomkhgvczjtcdts Pretty easy to use once you have the initial bullshit done. It certainly isn't secure to send over the wire though. The only viable solution is to use it server-side. See bitpost.com/ci.php code for details on using good old php to get the job done. View active tokens here: https://abettersoftware.org/settings/panel/apitokens/