Managing Multiple Unrelated Projects with Phabricator

Question

I'm trying to figure out a way to make Phabricator manage several unrelated products. I installed Phabricator, imported a few source repositories and customized the side menu by adding all the default Phabricator applications (just to get an idea of what Phabricator offers "out of the box").

At first, I liked what I saw, but after spending a bit of time exploring, it started to appear Phabractor is just a collection of various SCM tools that are not linked together. I'm really looking for a set of top level "Products" and under each I can create various related Wiki Pages, Tasks/Bugs, [sub]Projects, Uploaded Files, Legalpad entries, etc.

What I am seeing, for example, is a general Wiki Engine (Phriction) that is no way linked to a Project or a top-most Product. Also, I can create a Legalpad document, but again cannot assign it to a project or product. Same with Files I upload. Even my imported source code repositories are just floating out there without any link to a Project or Product.

Am I missing something? Is anyone using a single instance of Phabricator to manage multiple unrelated products with potentially different groups of end users?

One potential work-around is I could setup a custom Dashboard for each of my products and link in the associated projects, tasks and even links to related wiki pages, but seems like a lot of work for each product and it still seems there is no way to categorize Uploaded Files and Leagalpad.

Answer 1

Phabricator is very flexible and includes several different ways to organize your work and your workflows.

Spaces

Another answer already suggested that you could try Spaces, which is a sort of global grouping and that can be used to isolate everything within one space and keep it almost entirely separate from everything that's in another space.

Projects

Phabricator also has a concept of "Project Tags" which you can use to organize tasks, repositories, blog posts and various other "Objects" within the various Phabricator applications. Most objects support one or more tags and the tags are defined by Projects which you create. Tags can be used as free-form labels or you can create a hierarchy of projects and sub-projects.

I'll go into a bit more detail about using Phabricator's Projects feature since that is how I've used Phabricator so that is what I'm familiar with.

Organizing your work with with Projects and Tags

1. Create a top level project for your tool, product, team or whatever makes sense in your situation.
2. Tag the repositories, wikis pages, blog posts, tasks, etc which belong to the project created in 1. using the project's #hashtag.
3. Customize the menus on your project to link to related repositories, wikis, documentation, etc. The project menus are quite flexible, as are other "profile" menus such as dashboards and user favorites menus.
4. Use the project's workboard to manage tasks related to the project.
5. Create subprojects, milestones, etc as needed. 6, Repeat 1-5 for each project you work on.

Answer 2

@Flagrama answers is most of the reality. If you want simple hard separation like you could find in other tools like Redmine, Phabricator is not conceived this way.

Now there is something that could make thing a little more natural: Phabricator Spaces.

It allows to split things pretty neatly. You can see the doc here: https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/spaces/

Answer 3

In Phabricator you can create a Project. You can set it up so that anybody can join it, or so only administrators can add users. You can also make projects only visible/joinable to members of other projects.

"Visible to Members of Project..." is the basis of managing unrelated projects in Phabricator. Every repository you create, page you add to the Wiki, file you upload, or LegalPad document you create can be set to only be visible to members of a certain project.

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this is the limit of Projects in Phabricator at present so it may still not meet your needs.