Use Phabricator for Code Reviews

Phabricator is an open source collection of web applications which makes it easier to scale software companies. It is currently available as a continuous release.

This article explains setting up phabricator tool to review code, track bugs, browse source, and much more. I will be setting up http://review.vnykmshr.com as we discuss various aspects of the tool.

Begin with, lets add a CNAME record to vnykmshr.com DNS.

review 10800 IN CNAME vnykmshr.com.

This allows us to setup phabricator at review.vnykmshr.com. Next, we will set phabricator up on nginx with php-fpm.

Pre-requisites - Install nginx web server, php5, php5-fpm, mysql-server if not already installed.

sudo apt-get install nginx php5 php5-fpm php5-mysql php5-cli php5-cgi mysql-server

Lets get phabricator and it's dependencies, first pick a install directory (say /var/www/review).

$ mkdir -p /var/www/review && cd /var/www/review/
/var/www/review/$ git clone git://github.com/facebook/libphutil.git
/var/www/review/$ git clone git://github.com/facebook/arcanist.git
/var/www/review/$ git clone git://github.com/facebook/phabricator.git

Phabricator runs faster with APC installed, optional, but strongly recommended.

sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev php-pear
sudo pecl install apc

to verify, php5 -i | grep apc

Next, lets set up review.vnykmshr.com on nginx. Add the following server block to a file under /etc/nginx/sites-available/ and link it up from /etc/nginx/sites-enabled when ready.

server {
  server_name review.vnykmshr.com;

  root      /var/www/review/phabricator/webroot;
  try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;

  location / {
    index   index.php;

    if ( !-f $request_filename )
    {
      rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?__path__=/$1 last;
      break;
    }
  }

  location /index.php {
    fastcgi_pass   localhost:9000;
    fastcgi_index   index.php;

    #required if PHP was built with --enable-force-cgi-redirect
    fastcgi_param  REDIRECT_STATUS    200;

    #variables to make the $_SERVER populate in PHP
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING       $query_string;
    fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD     $request_method;
    fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE       $content_type;
    fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH     $content_length;

    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;

    fastcgi_param  GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
    fastcgi_param  SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx/$nginx_version;

    fastcgi_param  REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
  }
}

\m/