Developer Setup

Phabricator Contributor Documentation (Developer Guides)

How to configure a Phabricator development environment.

Overview

There are some options and workflows that may be useful if you are developing or debugging Phabricator.

Configuration

To adjust Phabricator for development:

• Enable phabricator.developer-mode to enable some options and show more debugging information.
• Enable phabricator.show-prototypes to show all the incomplete applications.
• See Using DarkConsole for instructions on enabling the debugging console.

Error Handling

Errors normally go to DarkConsole (if enabled) and the webserver error log, which is often located somewhere like /var/log/apache/error_log. This file often contains relevant information after you encounter an error.

When debugging, you can print information to the error log with phlog(...). You can phlog(new Exception(...)) to get a stack trace.

You can print information to the UI with throw new Exception(...), print_r(...), or var_dump(...).

You can abort execution with die(...) if you want to make sure execution does not make it past some point. Normally throw does this too, but callers can catch exceptions; they can not catch die(...).

Utilities

After adding, renaming, or moving classes, run arc liberate to rebuild the class map:

phabricator/ $ arc liberate

Until you do this, Phabricator won't recognize your new, moved, or renamed classes. You do not need to run this after modifying an existing class.

After any modifications to static resources (CSS / JS) but before sending changes for review or pushing them to the remote, run bin/celerity map:

phabricator/ $ ./bin/celerity map

This rebuilds the static resource map.

If you forget to run these commands you'll normally be warned by unit tests, but knowing about them may prevent confusion before you hit the warnings.

Command Line

Almost every script supports a --trace flag, which prints out service calls and more detailed error information. This is often the best way to get started with debugging command-line scripts.

Performance

Although it is more user-focused than developer-focused, the Troubleshooting Performance Problems guide has useful information on the tools available for diagnosing and understanding performance problems.

Custom Domains

If you're working with applications that support custom domains (like Phurl or Phame) you can normally test them by adding more entries to your webserver configuration that look exactly like the primary entry (or expanding the primary entry to match more domains).

Phabricator routes all requests based on host headers, so alternate domains do not normally need any kind of special configuration.

You may also need to add /etc/hosts entries for the domains themselves.

Creating Test Data

You can create test objects with the "Lipsum" utility:

phabricator/ $ ./bin/lipsum help generate
phabricator/ $ ./bin/lipsum generate ...

Test data can make your local install feel a little more realistic. With --quickly, you can generate a large amount of test data to help test issues with performance or scale.