Phabricator/High level Phabricator concepts

The goal of this page is to explain at a higher ("why") level how best to use Phabricator. Eventually this page should reflect the consensus opinions of the Team Practices Group. Step-by-step details for "how" to perform tasks in Phabricator can be left to other pages.

Major concepts

Phabricator has 3 main top-level objects: Users, Tasks, and Projects.

User

Each user has a profile. Users can Join or Subscribe to Projects, and can be Subscribed to or Assigned to Tasks.

Task

Tasks are the heart of the system, and mostly behave similarly to issues in other issue-tracking systems. Each Task is uniquely identified by its ID, which is in the form Txxxxx. Each task has a Title, Status, Assigned To, Priority, and Description, Visibility, Editability, and Security. Each also has a list of CC (Subscribers) and a list of associated Projects. Attachments can be added as part of a Description or Comment.

By conscious decision, Tasks in the WMF instance have very few fields, so for example they do not have "OS/Platform" or "See Also" fields. Requests to add additional fields are likely to be rejected, with the advice to instead include that information in the Description or in a Comment.

A task's status can only be one of:

• Open
• Resolved
• Stalled
• Declined
• Invalid
• Duplicate

These statuses are unrelated to the implied state that a task might be in, based on which column it is in any workboards. So for example, a task could have a status of "Open" but be in the "Done" column on a workboard. Or it might have a "Resolved" status but be in an "In Progress" column in a workboard. Although these cases are possible, they might (or might not) indicate that the task was managed incorrectly.

Project

Projects are unlike projects in most issue-tracking systems. See the project management page for more information.