Phabricator/Help

If you have questions, ask in the Discussion page. We will improve our documentation based on the feedback received.

Creating your account

• First, make sure you have a MediaWiki.org account. Many people have global/Single Unified Login accounts which also allow them to log into MediaWiki.org. You may already be logged in to MediaWiki.org. If not, try logging in with your Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, MediaWiki.org, etc. account. If that doesn't work, try unifying your account. Finally, if you can not unify your account (or don't have an account at all yet), signup for MediaWiki.org.
• Go to the Phabricator login page (the link shows as an On button in the top right when you're logged out).
• Click the sunflower button that says "Login or Register".
• You will be asked by MediaWiki.org to approve connecting.
• Phabricator will ask you for a username. In case of doubt, just use your Wikimedia username.

Advanced

If you have a wikitech.wikimedia.org account, (also known as an LDAP account or Gerrit account), you can also use that to login (the same Phabricator username can have both MediaWiki.org and LDAP connected). This can be a backup, in the unlikely event Wikimedia SUL is not working. Connect your Wikimedia SUL and LDAP accounts to a single Phabricator username! Otherwise you will create two separate Phabricator accounts.

Claiming your previous Bugzilla and RT accounts

Note: To attribute past Bugzilla and RT work, do this now, even though the imports have not happened yet.

1. Go to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/email/.
2. Add the email addresses that you used in fab.wmflabs.org, RT or Bugzilla (they are kept private).

Your account activity (comments, reports you created, etc) will be merged into your Phabricator account within the next days. Please be patient as this can take quite some time, depending on how active you were in Bugzilla and RT before. After the process to link your previous, imported contributions to your Phabricator account has finished, you will be e.g. able to search for reports in Phabricator that you had created in Bugzilla before Bugzilla's reports were imported into Phabricator.

Receiving updates and notifications

Phabricator notifies you about relevant activity, including your own actions. You can fine tune your email preferences to your taste, receiving web notifications only for certain activities, or no notifications at all.

Phabricator offers several tools to receive the notifications you wish to receive.

• If you are interested in a single object (a task, a mockup...) just click Subscribe in their page. Adding a comment will subscribe you automatically.
• If you are interested in all the activity within a project, you can Join it and then click Watch Project. (You can also subscribe to projects, which happens automatically when you join. The difference is that subscribers only get notified for changes if the project is in the task's Subscribers field, not when it is in the Projects field. See this explanation for more details.)

You can also define in your Email preferences for which specific actions (e.g. status, owner, priority or subscriber changes) in a task you would like to (not) receive notifications.

Creating Herald rules for notifications

Note that Herald is currently disabled (T493).

This is how you create custom notification rules in Wikimedia Phabricator's Herald. Imagine you want to watch all the tasks that are being created:

1. Click Create Herald Rule
2. Select Maniphest Tasks and Personal
3. Give a descriptive name to the rule, i.e. "All New Tasks".
4. In Conditions, select all of, Is newly created?, and is True.
5. In Action, select every time and Send me an email.
6. Save Rule

This is it. From that point, you will receive an email for every task being created. This is probably too much, though. This is how you can filter these notifications:

• If you want to be notified about new tasks only in specific projects, add a New Condition, and then select Projects and include any of, adding the projects you are interested about.
• If you want to be notified about new tasks only from specific users, add a New Condition, and then select Author and is any of, adding the users you are interested about.

You see where is this going. Adapting these rules you can watch the entire activity of a specific project without having to join it, you can watch certain keywords across the entire Phabricator, etc.

Writing comments and descriptions

Phabricator allows you to post and edit comments and descriptions using text formatting and inserting images or other files (FIXME: create instructions for each of these actions). You can use toolbar at the top of the input text area and you can use Phabricator's own markup.

At the end of the page you have a live preview to check whether your text looks as you expect.

Popular use of markup includes:

• Mentioning users as in @username will create a link to their profile and will CC them to the task.
• Adding a task number as in T123 will create a link to the task including a hover card. {T123} inserts the title of the task in your text.
• Adding a project name as in #Project will create a link to the project main page. In task descriptions it will add the project to the Projects field.
• If you want to quote text, you can simply add ">" at the beginning. If you want to reply a comment including it as a quote, click the drop down arrow at the right end of the comment you want to reply.
• If you want to display an uploaded mockup image file (like M123) embedded in your comment, write {M123}.
• If you want to create an external link (like [https://www.mediawiki.org example] in wiki markup), use [[ https://www.mediawiki.org | example ]] (including the whitespaces) in Phabricator.
• If you want to add a web address (URL link) in a comment (for example to provide a testcase), it is highly recommended to copy and paste the full web address from your web browser's address bar (like "https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Support_desk") instead of using MediaWiki markup (like "mw:Project:Support desk"). Interwiki prefixes like "mw:" are not supported in Phabricator and most customizations that Bugzilla had neither (e.g. Gerrit changes should be pasted as full web addresses too).

Note that Phabricator's own markup language is different from MediaWiki's markup. For more information about Phabricator's own markup language see the Remarkup Reference.

Creating a task

There are three ways to create a task, depending on the information you want to carry:

• Plain new task: click the + or the Create Task link located at the top right. You will get a blank form.
• A subtask of an existing task: click the Create Subtask link located in the right column of the current task. The dependency between both tasks will be set, and some values of the parent task will be carried by default (Assigned To, CC, Priority, Projects).
• A similar task to the one you just created: after creating a task, a Similar Task link is offered at the top right corner. Click it to prefill Assigned To, CC, Priority, and Projects with the same values.

Fill the form, leaving the fields you are not sure about empty.

Selecting projects

In order to relate a task with a project that uses Phabricator, you just need to start typing its name in the Projects field and select the project from the list of possible options. You can add one or more projects to the Projects field. If you are unsure, you can also leave it empty — triagers will take care of tasks that have no project set. There is a list of projects available.

Using e-mail

You can also create tasks by sending e-mail to [email protected]. The subject will be used as task title, the body will be used directly as is, and attachments will be included on the task. To select a project, use its hashtag somewhere in the body, e.g. #mediawiki-core.

Note: your email signature will be in the task descriptions, so please be aware personally identifiable information such as your name or contact information could become publicly visible this way, you can avoid this by removing your email signature prior to sending the email.

Passing certain values in the task creation URL

Project wikipages which offer a "Report a bug in Phabricator" link can pass numerous values via URL parameters appended to the generic task creation link such as:

• projects=project-name1,project-name2
• assign=assignee-name
• title=Title%20of%20task
• description=Description%20of%20task
• template=XXXX

Prefixe your properties with "?" and use "&" to chain properties together.

Example:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/create/?projects=Experimental-features&title=Hovercards:

Would create a new task with the tag "Beta-Feature" and prefix the title with "Hovercards:"

Uploading file attachments

There are several ways to upload files: You can add a file (for example a screenshot) to a comment via drag and drop with your mouse. If this is not available on your system you can use https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/file/upload/ and refer to file number (like "123") that is shown after successfully having uploaded by writing "F123" in a comment. Users can also copy and paste images via the clipboard functionality of their system. Advanced users could also use "arc upload" which provides an F number that can be used via {Fxx} syntax to embed in a comment.

Note that you cannot upload a file and then decrease the access level to the file (e.g linking it to a restricted security ticket). You would have to delete the file and reupload it with stricter access permissions. It is recommended to upload files which should have restricted access together with the creation of a restricted (security) ticket.

Searching for items

Phabricator consists of several applications (task management in "Maniphest" being one of them, and in the future also code review and other applications). The search field in the upper corner allow searching across all these applications. For a search with advanced search criteria across applications, use the Advanced Search.

Searching for tasks and bug reports

There is also an advanced search per application. To only search for tasks/bug reports, use the Advanced Search in Maniphest. Examples for the advanced search: To get a list of tasks which were created in the last 24 hours, set the "Created After" field to "-24 hours" or "-1 day".

Maniphests offers links to some predefined search queries. For example, click authored to get a list of tasks that you have created.

Search query URLs are stable so you can save and reuse them. You can share the link in your web browser's address bar with other users, e.g. via posting the link on a wikipage.

Note that some common queries are also available in the "Activity" tabs on the Phabricator frontpage.

Finding the Maniphest task corresponding to a Bugzilla bug number

All Phabricator tasks migrated from Bugzilla have a Reference field that contains a value "bz" followed by the number of the equivalent report in Bugzilla.

If you want to search the task corresponding to a specific Bugzilla report, use the Reference field in the advanced search.

Batch Edits

Phabricator offers the possibility to perform batch edits for tasks. At the end of any Maniphest search query you will find a "Batch Edit Selected" to edit all the tasks you have selected using Shift-Click. Users willing to use this feature need to join the Triagers group.

Statistics

Phabricator offers tables showing the open tasks by priority and by either user or project. Apart from that, Phabricator doesn't support further statistics, metrics, charts, reports (e.g. over time) or however you may call them, whether built-in or via an API.[1]

Creating a project

In Phabricator projects are tags, tags are projects. There is no tree hierarchy, and there are no subprojects (these might come in a near future, though). Tasks can be assigned to more than one project, and they can also be submitted without assigning them to any project.

When do you need a project?

In general, you need a project...

• when you have a established team running one or several projects (start here, ask more only when you need more)
• when you need a workboard (i.e. a sprint)
• when you need a tag or keyword to organize a type of task that can be part of any project (i.e. "Accessibility")

Requesting a new project

See Phabricator/Requesting a new project

MediaWiki templates and interwiki links

Tracked in Phabricator (?)
Task T177 Resolved

• You can link to Phabricator tasks from wiki pages using phabricator: and its shorter version phab: (i.e. [[phab:T454|example]] generates example).
• Template:Tracked has been updated to include links to Phabricator objects — see at the right how {{Tracked|T177|resolved}} renders.
• Template:Phabricator is also available; {{Phabricator|T176}} generates task T176.

Existing Bugzilla interwiki links and templates will still work, because those links will continue to point to bugzilla.wikimedia.org which will redirect them to the converted Phabricator task.

Diffusion

Further information: Phabricator/Diffusion

Diffusion is the Phabricator repository browser and repository management tool. Eventually we want to replace Gerrit for code review and repository management, and gitblit for repository read-only mirroring. Right now, we're mirroring some of our Git repositories to Phabricator for demonstration purposes.

Diffusion is integrated with the other tools in the Phabricator suite. For instance:

• When you commit Differential revisions to a tracked repository, they are automatically updated and linked to the corresponding commits;
• You can add Herald rules to notify you about commits that match certain rules;
• In tasks and other places, you can automatically link to commits.