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Diffusion User Guide: Permanent Refs
Phabricator User Documentation (Application User Guides)

Explains when Diffusion will take actions in response to discovering commits.

Overview

Diffusion can close tasks and revisions and take other actions when commits appear in a repository (either because they were pushed to Phabricator, or because they were pushed to some remote which Phabricator is observing).

This document explains when Diffusion acts on commits and how to configure this behavior.

Publishing Commits

Diffusion distinguishes between "pushed" and "published" commits.

Not all commits that are pushed to a repository are destined for greatness: for example, many tools push temporary commits to secret places like refs/pull/123, refs/notes/*, or refs/changes/12/345678/1.

Sometimes, human users intentionally push changes to branches like "tmp-hack-ignore-123". This is formally discouraged by Phabricator, but the practice is so widespread that we've given up trying to stop anyone from doing it.

Phabricator will import these commits and create pages for them so you can view them in the web UI and link to them, but does not take any other actions until they are "published".

A commit is "published" when it becomes reachable from a permanent ref. By default, all branches are permanent refs, so pushing a commit to "master" will publish it, but pushing a commit to refs/pull/123 (either directly, or by using a tool like GitHub) will not.

Usually, commits are published by pushing them directly to a permanent branch like "master", or by merging a temporary branch into a permanent branch.

When a commit is published, Phabricator acts on it and:

  • sends email;
  • delivers notifications;
  • publishes a feed story;
  • triggers Audits;
  • runs Herald rules;
  • updates mentioned objects;
  • closes referenced tasks; and
  • closes associated revisions.

Configuring Repositories

You can control publishing behavior in two primary ways: by configuring which refs are considered to be permanent refs, and by disabling publishing entirely.

By default, all branches are considered permanent refs and all other refs (including tags and other arbitrary custom refs) are considered nonpermanent. This means that, by default, pushing commits to a branch like "tmp-hack-ignore-123" will publish those commits.

If you want to be free to push commits to temporary branches like this and only want commits on certain branches (like "master") to be published, configure which refs are treated as permanent by editing Branches โ†’ Permanent Refs from the "Manage" page of the repository.

To disable publishing entirely, select Basics โ†’ Disable Publishing.

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