At work we’ve been using Trac for quite a while now, but it’s always interesting to look at other options. When listening to a recent episode of git Minutes on Blender’s move to using git I heard of Phabricator for the first time. There are good instructions for how to install it on Ubuntu, but I couldn’t find any for ArchLinux.

These are my notes for installing Phabricator on ArchLinux. Hopefully someone will find them useful.

Basic setup

I performed this install in a virtual machine (using VirtualBox). The virtual machine is configured with a bridged network and I gave it the FQDN of phabarch.vbox.net.

Packages

Beyond the packages installed as part of the basic install I needed the following packages:

• lighttpd
• git
• mariadb
• php
• php-cgi
• php-apcu
• php-gd

Setup of mariadb

Following the instructions on the ArchLinux wiki page on mariadb is first started the service and then finished the installation:

# systemctl start mysqld.service
# mysql_secure_installation

After this I restarted the service, and made sure it’ll restart on system start:

# systemctl restart mysqld.service
# systemctl enable mysqld.service

I picked the root password mariaroot.

Setup of lighttpd

Modify /etc/lighttpd/lighttp.conf to look something like this:

server.modules = (
  "mod_rewrite",
  "mod_fastcgi",
)

server.port = 80
server.username  = "http"
server.groupname = "http"
server.document-root = "/srv/http"
server.errorlog  = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
dir-listing.activate = "enable"
index-file.names = ( "index.php", "index.html" )
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php" )
mimetype.assign  = (
  ".html" => "text/html",
  ".txt" => "text/plain",
  ".css" => "text/css",
  ".js" => "application/x-javascript",
  ".jpg" => "image/jpeg",
  ".jpeg" => "image/jpeg",
  ".gif" => "image/gif",
  ".png" => "image/png",
  "" => "application/octet-stream"
  )

fastcgi.server += ( ".php" =>
  ((
    "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",
    "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php.socket",
    "max-procs" => 1,
    "bin-environment" => (
      "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "4",
      "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000",
    ),
    "bin-copy-environment" => (
      "PATH", "SHELL", "USER",
    ),
    "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable",
  ))
)

$HTTP["host"] =~ "phabarch(\.vbox\.net)?" {
  server.document-root = "/srv/http/phabricator/webroot"
  url.rewrite-once = (
    "^(/rsrc/.*)$" => "$1",
    "^(/favicon.ico)$" => "$1",
    # This simulates QSA (query string append) mode in Apache
    "^(/[^?]*)\?(.*)" => "/index.php?__path__=$1&$2",
    "^(/.*)$" => "/index.php?__path__=$1",
  )
}

Setup of php

Modify /etc/php/php.ini and enable the following extensions:

• mysqli.so
• openssl.so
• iconv.so
• apcu.so
• gd.so
• posix.so

Also disable the open_basedir setting.

Getting and setting up Phabricator

Checking it out

I placed it in /srv/http:

# cd /srv/http
# git clone git://github.com/facebook/libphutil.git
# git clone git://github.com/facebook/arcanist.git
# git clone git://github.com/facebook/phabricator.git

Database configuration

# cd /srv/http/phabricator
# ./bin/storage upgrade --user root --password mariaroot
# ./bin/config set mysql.user root
# ./bin/config set mysql.pass mariaroot

Set the base URI

# cd /srv/http/phabricator
# ./bin/config set phabricator.base-uri 'http://phabarch.vbox.net/'

Diffusion configuration

# mkdir /var/repo
# ./bin/config set diffusion.allow-http-auth true

At this point I started lighttpd and used the web interface to configure environment.append-paths to include the path of git-core, /usr/lib/git-core.

phd configuration

First create the daemon user

# useradd -r -M -d /tmp phabd

Then create the phd log dir and set its owner and group:

# mkdir /var/tmp/phd/log
# chown -R phabd:phabd /var/tmp/phd/

Also make the daemon user the owner of the repo folder used by Diffusion:

# chown phabd:phabd /var/repo

Configure sudo

Create the file /etc/sudoers.d/phabricator with this content:

http ALL=(phabd) SETENV: NOPASSWD: /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend

User configuration

In the web interface set a VCS password for the user.

Play

Now the system should be ready to be played with :)