How To Install Phabricator on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Phabricator on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Phabricator is an open-source collection of web applications that help software companies build better software. Phabricator is similar to GIT, and SVN. Currently maintained by Phacility, it was originally developed as an internal tool at Facebook. It is available as free software under the Apache License, version 2.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of a Phabricator on a Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Phabricator on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install php7.1-cli php7.1-gd php7.1-opcache php7.1-mysql php7.1-json php7.1-mcrypt php7.1-xml php7.1-curl

Step 3. Installing Phabricator on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

First, create and switch to the directory in which we will download Phabricator and its dependencies run the following command:

mkdir /var/www/html/myapps
cd /var/www/html/myapps

Next, clone the needed Git repositories from Phacility:

sudo git clone https://github.com/phacility/libphutil.git
sudo git clone https://github.com/phacility/arcanist.git
sudo git clone https://github.com/phacility/phabricator.git

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Phabricator.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Phabricator. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Phabricator installation:

use mysql;
ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'your_mysql_root_password';
flush privileges;

Next, Enter the phabricator directory:

cd /var/www/html/myapp/phabricator

Now, it’s time to configure MySQL. Execute the following commands:

./bin/config set mysql.host localhost
./bin/config set mysql.user root
./bin/config set mysql.pass your_mysql_root_password

Then, run the storage upgrade script to load the Phabricator schemata into it. You’ll be asked to press ‘y’ while loading database schema:

./bin/storage upgrade --user root --password your_mariadb_root_password

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Phabricator.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘phabricator.conf’ on your virtual server:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/phabricator.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/phabricator.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/phabricator.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/phabricator.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/myapp/phabricator/webroot
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/myapp/phabricator/webroot/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

sudo a2ensite phabricator
systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing Phabricator.

Phabricator will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://phabricator.domain.com and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Phabricator. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Phabricator in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Phabricator website.